Devil May Cry: In the Mission
by Chasm
Summary: On hold... A quasinovelization of the first game. This's my take. R&R and enjoy
1. Down the stairs, then bring it!

The jewel-like stone that had shone like a miniature sun now burned as low as simmering coals, and it was fading fast.

"_The Melancholy Soul wanes with each passing moment. Make haste, mongrel_!"

"Don't push me, Alastor," warned Dante, his mad dash carrying him over the following flight of steps. Meanwhile, a trio of devils harried his every step. Ethereal by nature, their kind had adopted a sinister, more terrible form than their lesser cousins, the Sin Scissors. Like the Scissors, only their highly decorated masks and fearsome weapons were tangible, though that didn't stop them from passing through walls. Everything else - from their billowing black cloaks, to their cruelly clawed hands - were as substantial as air. They were the takers of living souls, false grim reapers.

Sin Scythes.

Only the pressing sense of urgency kept Dante from lashing out at the Sins. He couldn't spare a moment to blow them away as they alternatively slipped in and out of the very stone walls, attacking with massive scythes able to boomerang on a dime back toward him. To make matters worse, his mind wasn't focused. He couldn't help but think of the recent past, and what it might mean, if anything. The fight with the demon shadow had eaten more time than he would have liked, and now the Soul might fizzle out entirely. The Soul had shown him a brief vision of where it wished to go, that going there was paramount. In the staircase tower was a sealed door at the bottom level, a door with a lion's face, three-eyed and roaring, bearing an inscription, something about a "guiding soul".... It was a stretch, even with the vision, but he reasoned he had little else to go on, so...what the hell, right? Besides, he had a good feeling about this. The devil hunter's thoughts skewed abruptly to the battle with the devil knight - 

He had me, but something happened....something....having to do with my pendant...?

- And a sin rushed him with a shrieking battle cry, blasting away the distracting reverie, and nearly shaking away his guard in sudden fright. Materializing from the wall ahead of him, Dante's senses only registered the faux spirit's scream, the ivory color of its mask, the evil dark of its eyes, and the flash of a descending blade. With the dimming stone in his left, and Ivory in his right, Dante could not defend with Alastor. Nor could he shoot back in the suddenly close quarters, so he opted for the next best thing.

Quicker than the sin could anticipate, its prey dove into its guard, and it felt the briefest instant of surprise before its vulnerable mask - its true, physical form - shattered against a solid head-butt. It screeched and flailed and clawed at the empty nothing where its face had been, but Dante did not see this. Forgoing the glowing red orbs - the sin's life essence - he ran on. He made it to the twenty-by-twenty foot landing, and the door leading back into the fountain room. He peered over the railing at the five story drop.... He had made the jump once before to access the elevating pedestal and the Death Sentence sword, but not with Sins at his back. 

"_Looks like the end_," taunted Alastor. "_Surely, this will be the proverbial straw that will break the devil's back, yes_?"

A derisive snort was Dante's only reply. The red clad hunter boosted himself smoothly over the railing, taking the plunge as a scythe sped over the location he'd just vacated. The maddening cackle of the two remaining Sins reached a crescendo, and all at once, he saw them. Both non-spirits were suddenly below him, casually twirling their frightening arsenal, yet anxiously circling the area he would touch down. With Ivory alone he managed to send a wild spray of lead at both sins. They scattered for cover; not a single bullet finding its mark, yet the devils' keened in delight that their prey was almost among them. Never was it the hunter's intention to kill - though that would have been a plus - but it was to _distract_. Dante splashed down into dirty, ankle-deep water, allowing the force of the fall to bend his knees and bow his back. In a blink, he straightened himself, sprinting toward the lion embossed door....

"_Behind_!" came Alastor's warning.

Having regained their bearings a breath after the hunter's darting run the sins' gazes converged on their prey. 

Let this work, was Dante's silent prayer.

He jammed the dying stone into a slot in the lion's jaws - 

- The sins shrieked in victory as they let their weapons fly -

- and the Melancholy Soul flashed brilliantly, followed closely by the blessed sound of a retracting lock. Outward, swung the metal door, sending Dante headfirst through the portal. He actually felt the air part inches from the back of his skull as dual scythes vanished into the new wall ahead of him. Twisting around from his diving crouch, the red clad hunter let momentum slam his back to the wall as he brought both Ebony and Ivory to bear. He pumped each trigger three times into the lead sin, decimating its mask, the telltale whoosh of whirring blades telling him to lunge away...._now_! 

Despite the death of its wielder both hellish scythes shot back through the stone wall where the hunter had been standing. No sooner did the projectiles clear the open portal did Dante dart back into view of the remaining Sin Scythe. It looked up at him from watching its kin's disintegrating form drift to the ground - - and screamed the most hideous, hate-filled sound ever to stain mortal memory. 

"It's mutual," growled Dante. The Sin Scythe flew at him in a rage. It managed to cover a hair over two feet before it, too, joined its fellow in oblivion.

****


	2. Lord of the flies, kinda

Chasm says: I don't own DMC 1or 2 in any way shape or form......darn. Giving Alastor its a**hole personality, however, was my idea. -grins- 

****

It was the muck smell of stagnating water, moist stone, coupled with mold and algae that snared Dante's attention, first. After his senses told him he was in the clear, after he was finished absorbing the Sins' essence, did he close the door behind him, and take stock of his new surroundings. Ankle deep water pervaded here as it did the previous chamber. He was in a short corridor of damp, moss-encrusted stonemasonry that stretched out to either side of him. A sharp, ninety-degree turn at either end obscured his view of what lay ahead. Time had fractured and pitted the high ceiling's gray stonework in some places, as well as the walls themselves - which were nearly black with mildew - and a constant sheen of wetness could be seen all over. The devil hunter was aware of the humidity in the still air, and realized it to be the source of the condensation. The source of light by which he saw these things fell upon the simple, black iron-wrought lanterns bolted into the stone walls at regular intervals. 

While the pale white light dispelled much of the gloom, it remained cold, and devoid of comfort. Guns in hand, Dante explored the tunnel-like corridor to his left. Discovering it to be nothing more than a crumbling dead end, he backtracked. The slosh of water about his feet was loud in his ears. Not bothering to mask his approach Dante boldly rounded the corner.

The waterway's main tunnel yawned out before him.

There was perhaps thirty yards of gleaming-wet, slime-covered, cracked-and-crumbling tunnel to traverse before it terminated at a massive, iron-banded portcullis. In his immediate view, however, were a metal door a dozen feet ahead and to his right, and a smaller tunnel - service tunnel? - to his left.

"_Why can't you just die_?" Alastor hissed low.

Dante ignored the spirit's venomous statement. He walked over to the metal door, noting its remarkably clean condition; not a speck of rust marred the wet metal's surface. It looked almost new.

Just another inconsistency in the funhouse from Hell, he thought dryly.

The heavy door opened on worn hinges. Dante entered the new room, only half his thoughts anchored in the present. He hadn't killed the devil knight, and even though the monster had vanished in a ball of flame, that was no guarantee it was dead... 

And why should I even care, for that matter? 

And he knew it was because the sight of the towering knight had sparked something within him. He played back the incident in his mind's eye, recalling the faint, but insistent voice in the back of his head beseeching him to....to what? When the knight had leapt down from its perch, and battle was imminent, Dante had hesitated to make the first move. Why? Because of some obscure emotion? Or was it just a moment of weakness against such a formidable foe? But of the many questions waiting their turn for answers, one took center stage: Why had the diabolic warrior reacted to the hunter's medallion? Dante dismissed his train of thought with a shake of his head. 

If he had known the duel was going to give him a migraine afterwards he would have readily avoided it. God, he hate distractions on the job. Nothing was straightforward anymore, damn it! But then, certainty in his life had long ago set up residence elsewhere, ever since.... 

Another shake of the head - more forceful this time - blew away the unwanted memories before they could take hold. The mystery of the devil knight would remain so until he had something more to work with....maybe. Besides, on a lighter note, a second encounter _would _give him an excuse to pay the bastard back for that strangle hold.

Satisfied the issue was set to rest - at least, temporarily - he gave his new surroundings a proper once over. The place was like a plane hanger, he decided, with a length just shy of the main waterway's tunnel, but with twice the width. The wall immediately to his right comprised of a row of four portcullises, each gate slick and aged, but obviously sturdy. 

Lining the walls all around were drainage pipes three feet in diameter, their open maws revealing nothing but darkness. Water dribbled from the pipes like thin drool to splash into the ankle-high pool below. It produced a rain-like effect, but it was a false rain that wasn't in the least cleansing. 

"_These ancient waterways were used to deviate the flow of flood waters,_" commented the lightning spirit."_Often would these tunnels fill to the ceiling....did you know this_, _mongrel_?"

"You're point?" asked Dante with minimal interest. He holstered Ebony and Ivory in favor of Alastor's weight, then slowly, methodically, began checking the pipes. It wouldn't be the first - or last - time a minion of Hell disguised its taint, only to reveal itself as it pounced.

"_I merely wish to add caution to your step_," murmured the lightning spirit after a minute. "_It wouldn't do to die here, would it_?"

Dante abruptly ceased his inspection. "Say what?" he asked, incredulous. "Thought you couldn't wait to be rid of me? You on something?"

"_Do not confuse a change of heart with common sense, mongrel_," snarled the devil arms. "_It is only because you took my power that I am bound to give such advise. We are no more allies than the spawn you fight within these walls, remember that_."

The devil hunter blinked, then resumed examining the pipes for evil life with an amused chuckle.

"_What_? _Why do you laugh_?" came the defensive hiss.

The red clad hunter didn't answer right away, just to rankle the other's nerves. "It just hit me....it's so obvious, now."

"_What is_?" 

"Just the real reason I can't bring myself to ever like you," replied Dante with a half shrug. 

"_Hmph_! _I would think my constantly hurling insults and demoralizing remarks would be sufficient reason enough, fool_!" 

Dante was inspecting the central pipe stuck in the chamber's far wall when he said, "Nah, insults are cake. You _really _want to know?"

"_I demand to know_!"

Dante's expression became one of absolute, deadly seriousness as he brought the sentient blade in front of his face. The half-devil's own lethal visage reflected back at him.

"'Cause you can't kill a spirit."

Before a startled Alastor could sputter a reply, the sword was driven deep into the maw of the drainage pipe, killing the thing laying in wait. A high, clicking-squeal - like that of a monster insect - emitted from the deceptive darkness as Dante snatched up the item the creature had guarded. 

Quickly stuffing the item - a key - inside a coat pocket, Dante whirled, sensing taint all about -

- as the chamber's drainage system became infested with hideous insect life. 

Dozens of bloated horrors in hard shells of dull, blue-black and bile green poured out from hiding with eagerness bordering predatory frenzy. Many were as big as mid-sized dogs, some far larger, and while the light-bodied took to the air on buzzing wings, the heavyweights scurried about with cruelly hooked claws. Numerous multifaceted eyes flashed crimson with alien intelligence as they fixed on the lone hunter. The fly-like demons - the Beelzebub - reeked of the foul things beneath fermenting mounds of garbage, and it didn't take long for the sour stench to fill the room. 

Though it had taken scant seconds for the enemy swarm to emerge, Dante was already wading into them like a death wish. Many airborne beelzebub died in halves against Alastor's razor edge, while others were simply smashed with the flat of the blade. Dante caught the erratic flight of another oncoming bug from the corner of his eye. He laughed and adopted a classic batter's stance. The stupid bug made a dry, little rasping scream of animal hunger - 

- and Alastor swung in, blasting the demon's life, and its remains, clear across the long chamber. Dante smiled in satisfaction as his makeshift baseball collided into a small group of flying hostiles, crippling at least one, and sending the rest scattering. But his homerun swing had not lost momentum, and Alastor arced up, severing the life of a beelzebub hovering too close. The blade's point came down on the fat, puke-green thorax of one of the larger specimens, pinning it. The ground-bound demon screamed and flailed with meat hook-sized claws. Dante had to arc his body away from the savage swipes.

Die already! he mentally spat. 

Suddenly, the thing lurched forward - ripping itself open with a horrific spray of internal fluids - talons raking at the devil hunter's legs. The dying insect's claws only managed to snag cloth, but that was enough. Pulling itself closer, it's mouth - just a hole with teeth - cracked open, and it spat with its death shriek. Dante saw the attack coming, knew what it meant, and spun away with Alastor trailing behind. The beelzebub's spittle was a writhing mass of grotesque maggots, each as long as Dante's trigger finger, and twice as thick. The small mound of sickly white parasites almost immediately began cannibalizing each other when they found nothing else to prey upon. What's more, the slain beelzebub's hard-shelled body began to dissolve under the hungry mouths of maggots still within its gut. It was as if its death was a red flag, a cue for the worms to turn on their host/parent. Dante's lips curled in disgust. Eventually, he knew, the last surviving vermin would devour itself, until nothing remained. Other individuals among the cloud of demon kind began employing their living venom with frightening suddenness. At one point a burning sensation spread across the back of his neck, and he slapped away the voracious maggots before they could do any real harm. More than once did Dante trade Alastor's edge for the ranged devastation of Ebony and Ivory, and in a blink, five flyers were splattered goo, and a green crawler lay twitching. When a duo of green demons thought to overrun him with a combined charge, the hunter ran as if he meant to evade them. They hissed with the frenzy of the chase as a quartet of fliers joined in with equal abandon. The hunter's path took him parallel along the east wall, and he was fast approaching the corner where portcullis and stone wall met. Suddenly, another green demon thought it might end the chase early by marching directly into Dante's path, spitting its vile venom. Dante ducked, allowing the spittle to soar overhead - and shower his nearest pursuer, a green crawler - as he shifted into a crouching spin. Ebony and Ivory were briefly replaced while Alastor swung in horizontally, skimming the water's surface, and shearing the bothersome interloper in two. Without hesitation, he vault the last dozen feet onto the portcullis, but didn't stop there. The interlocking bars made perfect footholds, and it wasn't hard to continue running up the ancient gate. The beelzebubs' eagerness caused them to err, and their reflexes were not prepared to save them. Dante knew this. He pushed off from nearly ceiling-height, performing his own brutal rush. Alastor whipped about in a wicked roundhouse that left all four fliers halved and quite dead. The attack's momentum brought him about to face the way he had come. Dante landed in a crouch, Alastor once again at his back, as the single survivor of the pursuit party tried to turn around, and stumble to a halt, at the same time. It was a rather comical show, Dante decided with a smirk, so he slowly withdrew his pistols, waiting for the stupid bug to about face. Even though a good number of Beelzebub still buzzed furiously about him, the hunter was unconcerned. He saw his prey finally turn its red, glaring gaze toward him, saw in them the beginnings of real fear. The quaking beelzebub only truly knew its end the instant _after _Ebony and Ivory let loose a barrage of lead into its hard-shelled body. The death of even more of their kin seemed to enrage the demon swarm...

But that was the pique of the swarm's aggression, and the hunter's had only just begun. His movements were a blur, even without Alastor's power, and he eventually gave up counting the enemy dead. 

Hardly a minute's time elapsed, and only a handful of mutant insects endured. The three remaining ground bound beelzebub gnashed their mandibles nervously, while the two surviving fliers resolved that a hasty retreat would be preferable. 

Dante made sure Ebony and Ivory gave them a proper farewell.

The three green demons chattered and hissed as they cautiously closed in on three sides. Smiling like a kid that knew a secret he wouldn't tell, the half-devil allowed himself to be herded into a corner. He even went so far as to holster his guns, feigning helplessness. Three pairs of compound eyes flared crimson with insane hunger, their stunted wings and toothy mouths trilling in barely contained blood lust. When they spat in unison they couldn't understand how their prey evaded so quickly. A singular, powerful bound saw Dante somersault, end over end, above and beyond the small group and their ill-directed venom. Ebony and Ivory appeared in hand mid-flight, and the two beelzebub flanking their leader only knew they had died when their wretched souls began burning in hellfire. Dante touched down with a muted splash, spun on his heels to face the surviving hellspawn, but the demon had not waited to be slaughtered. It was less than ten feet away when it reared up like an obscene centaur with an ear-splitting screech, claws slashing. Before the hideous abomination realized its fate, the devil hunter stepped into the charge. Held at arms length, momentum drove Ebony trigger-deep into the screaming mouth. The tactic earned Dante lacerated fingers and knuckles, but the minor wounds were already healing. Instinctively, stupidly, the creature tried to chew through the gun's barrel as it sought to claw Dante's face, completely ignoring his outstretched arm. Dante cocked his head, and declared with a sigh, "You know, I _was _going to play with you a little longer, but....

oh well." 

Chasm asks: So, what do you think? Can anyone guess what mission this one is? Any questions, and I'll answer them in the next chapter. Remember, this mission isn't over yet...!


	3. Simple Conversation

Chasm says: DMC and its character aren't mine, but Alastor's a**hole personality is.

(Thank you Orin Drake for the reviews, it really helps. And Zellychan, thanks to you too.)

****

The ward of souls sealing the hunter's only exit shattered with the sound of breaking glass. Dante sloshed Alastor beneath the chill water flooding the area, ridding the blade of any unwholesome demonic anatomy. He briefly wondered why the ward was put up in the first place. Did Mundus really think he would try to escape?

Pfeh! And his dad was the pope! 

Since the red blood orbs strewn throughout the chamber had mostly dissipated, the devil hunter only collected those of his most recent kill. Back in the main tunnel, a smattering of demonic Beelzebub gave Ebony and Ivory a less than adequate workout, and Dante was moving passed their twitching remains in moments. 

It had just gotten to that point when he stopped wondering how every room became re-infested.

He ignored the service tunnel, for now, in favor of venturing further down the main waterway, but resolved to check it out on his way back. Eventually, he saw his path angle left from the massive portcullis. He discovered a large, steel double door just around the corner. It was marked with rust and mineral stains, yet it looked able to withstand the force of a battering ram. Bolts as big around as half-dollars lined the sizable door, reinforcing it. If the stout nature of the door was any indication of what lay ahead, then Dante didn't acknowledge it. Danger on a grand scale laying in wait _did _flit through his mind, though, he merely chose to deal with it when and if it came. 

No sweat, no worry, but be prepared. A motto to live by. 

Dante pushed at the heavy, latchless doors with one hand - locked and utterly unmoving - then remembered his newly-acquired key. From an inner coat pocket he produced the key - a rusty old thing of plain design - then fit it into the keyhole roughly at the door's center.....where it stuck.

With a grunt of mild surprise the red clad hunter attempted to turn the key forcefully. Fearing it would snap in two if he persisted, he tried pulling it free. "You have _got _to be kidding me," he grumbled when the item in question refused to budge. 

"_Something the matter_?" Alastor crackled to life.

"It speaks," was the devil hunter's quip. "You know, silence truly _is _golden." 

"_Spare me your wit, such as it is_. _I was_...._lost in thought. Now, what is the problem_?"

Soaked from near-constant battles in the waterway, and beginning to feel chilled, Dante crossed his arms while summoning up a degree of patience for the task at hand. "Door's stuck," he said simply.

"_Yes, I'm aware of that_. _Was it your doing_?"

"I found a key that jammed in this lock," Dante stated in a no-nonsense tone, "and I'm seriously considering using you as a makeshift lock pick....unless you come up with a better idea, that is."

Alastor muttered angrily in an alien dialect, no doubt the language of the Underworld, probably an insult, too. 

"_Should you not rest between bouts of mortal combat_?" the devil spirit finally grated. "_I tire of your abuse._"

"Yeah..." drawled Dante with deliberate inattention, idly scratching the side of his jaw. "So about this door..." Dante couldn't help but grin at Alastor's growls of frustrated indignation. He doubted the lightning spirit's pride would ever allow it to fully accept its status as his weapon. Truth to tell, the young half-devil was a bit winded from consecutive hostile encounters. He would have recovered completely by now, too, if the tank-like Phantom hadn't been such a hassle....but he wasn't going to tell Alastor that. Though the spirit spoke in his mind, it could no more read his thoughts than he could read a closed book. The hunter found, almost by accident, if he wished the sentient blade to know his thoughts, then he would direct them accordingly, or simply open up that guarded part of himself. He could always speak his thoughts aloud, otherwise, Alastor was in the dark.

Not waiting for a better solution, Dante took the living blade in both hands. 

"_Wait_! _W_-_what are you doing_?" was Alastor's squawk of surprise, and proof of its lack of clairvoyance. 

The spirit shrieked in protest as the sword's razor tip sliced into the vertical crease dividing the double doors. Immoveable object met irresistible force and fat, blue-white sparks exploded with enough violence to make Dante flinch. Once the peal of tortured metal resonating off the walls ceased, did he blink away the afterimages, and look upon his handy work. The sturdy doors, once marked by age and disuse, now stood partially open, was badly scorched along the inside of both frames, and the lock and key were melted to slag. A fine haze accompanied the thick smell of ozone in the stale air. 

As Dante's expression of amazement turned into one of satisfaction, the familiar voice of Alastor roared in his skull. 

"_Rrrrrr_-_I am not a _tool! _If nothing else, use your guns, use Force Edge, _use your head! _I was meant to rend the souls from the living, not perform menial tasks at your convenience_!"

"Look, number one: I didn't _feel _like using Force Edge, okay. Two: Ebony and Ivory were made to blow your relatives back to Hell in style, and three: the shotgun's for whatever forgot to die after step two. 'Sides, ammo for that one's scarce."

"_And what of the use of your thick skull_?_ Or did you intentionally leave that out as a lost cause_?" "I did use my head," retorted the hunter, feigning hurt. "Using you as a lock pick was shear genius, 'specially since I knew it would piss you off -"

"_Bastard_!"

"- oh, and you'll perform any "menial tasks" I want. If I want to use you to scrape the mud off my boots, I will, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it." 

"_You wouldn't dare_?" gasped the sentient blade, angry and afraid at once.

"Hell yes! Can you say, "paperweight"? How about, "coat rack"?" 

A good ten seconds elapsed with nothing but the sound of dripping water echoing in the background. Dante chose that moment to check his shotgun - the most recent addition to his arsenal - for wet shells. He knew well that soggy ammo would downgrade the powerful gun into a fancy club, and it was difficult enough to find ammunition in the first place. Returning the sentient blade to his back, Dante shrugged off the shotgun and shoulder strap. A deft flick of the wrist opened the large barrels, and a quick inspection proved to be a mixed blessing. One shell was clinically drowned -

- Crap! -

- but the other was salvageable enough. Tossing the useless shell away, Dante moved to replace it with a drier partner. He reached into a saturated jacket pocket, suddenly worried if any dry ammo remained, and was relieved when there were. Perhaps it was because the inside pocket rode high on his chest? Nah, he was soaked through, had to be dumb luck. In any case, he finished loading the gun, then looped the shoulder strap over his head, letting it rest diagonally across his chest. Then he remembered the unfinished business...

"Yo, Alastor, you still there?" he asked, retrieving the blade. 

"..._I_....._I_....," stammered the boggled spirit.

"Yeah?"

"...._I hate you_," hissed Alastor. 

Unfazed, Dante moved passed the warped and scorched doors, Alastor's length resting comfortably against his right shoulder. 

Chasm apologizes: I know-I KNOW! This one's too short. Understand, I'm writing this as it comes to me, and I pay particular attention to detail. Also, I realize that the shotgun had limitless ammo in the game, but think about it....Dante has survived the hunting business solely with Ebony and Ivory and Force Edge up to this point. Doesn't it make sense that he would use Ebony and Ivory - ol'trusty and reliable - more over any other gun? That's my opinion, hence, the limited use of the shotgun. The other weapons Dante finds will be the same way, which may or may not cause him to discard them throughout the course of the missions.

Now, using Alastor over Force Edge is an entirely different story. Who wouldn't WANT to use the more powerful, cool-looking, able-to-devil-trigger-you sword? Force Edge is, what, weak and...shiny...? 


	4. Unexpected

Disclaimer: DMC and its character aren't mine, but Alastor's a**hole personality is. 

Did I take too long? Not sure if this chapter falls under angst this time, largely due to the fact that it is also somewhat darker. 

- Lunatic Pandora: If anything, Dante and Alastor will learn to respect one another, but I can't see them being anymore than that.

- M. Wilson: Glad you like. Dante's personality was easy to get into 'cause I like him so much. As for Alastor, I've always favored the sword in the game, and so I've had a while to come up with a convincing personality. 

- Zellychan: There are things in the game that were never explained. You know this. Now, insert those 'unexplained' quirks into the real world, and see the consequences? I enjoy having Dante puzzle out the inconsistencies where they shouldn't be. *grins*

- Claudia, Bluemizu, Orin Drake: Glad that you all like the conversations between Dante and Alastor. Two stubborn individuals butting heads can be very entertaining I think!

Beyond the doors was a decidedly different atmosphere. Where the air should have been stale and humid, a thin, dry haze filled the hall, graying anything more than fifteen feet away. Where everything should have reeked of water and aged stone, the distinct odor of sulfur invaded here. Even through cloths soaked in muck-water could he detect warmth in the new air, and not the chill dankness he had come to associate with the waterways. The white glow of the ever-present lamps did not exist here, instead, was replaced by a bright shade of orange light. Dante thought it curious that the illumination didn't touch every dark, shadowy corner. Light even failed to penetrate the few inches of water lapping about his feet, as if sediment had been stirred in, and had yet time to settle. Dante noticed all this with a practiced eye, vaguely wondering if he had finally found the illusive gate into Hell....on second thought, he doubted it. 

The Gates of Hell couldn't be _this _subtle, he thought, thinking of the let-down if it was. 

Somehow, he just couldn't picture those terrible gates being anything less than awesome in their perversion. He scanned the walls and ceiling of the cul-de-sac he found himself in, listened for anything ominous, and, satisfied he wasn't in any immediate peril, made for the short corridor's only outlet. The rhythmic slosh of his own footsteps were the only sounds to be heard, and, unlike before, the hunter chose to exercise caution. It was very possible he was not alone, though he couldn't sense the taint of actual hellspawn. It was more a general feeling of foreboding, like an insistent pressure in the back of his mind.

Or it could just be the creepy atmosphere.

As such, he rounded the ensuing corner expecting nothing, though with Alastor ready at his shoulder, just in case. No thing, or things, jumped to greet him. The long stretch of tunnel - another major waterway - spanned so far so that the massive portcullis at its end was barely discernible, and muted of color. 

He sniffed at the misty air. Yup, sulfur stench was more potent here. Dante was half-convinced that something was, in fact, waiting for him, but he kept hold of his doubts. The wiles the Underworld could create often allowed for little certainty, and much suspicion. The Sin Scissor posing as a harmless portrait, the Shadow in the lion statue, even his own reflection in a mirror had proven nothing more than a ruse, a disguise for devils and demons waiting to pounce. 

Even then, Dante had never truly accepted what he saw on the surface, resolving to call it "harmless" only after he'd killed it, or some hard evidence appeared to prove its innocence. He was on Hell's front porch, and that left him at a disadvantage, though it hardly bothered him.

He liked a challenge.

And speaking of challenges... He never liked Alastor, though he found himself grudgingly accepting the spirit's presence a little more each passing minute. The sentient sword was good to have in a fight; always watching his back, often granting him precious seconds of forewarning. Beyond that, however, only insults and invectives. "I've been thinking...." said Dante casually, gently tapping the blade against his shoulder, making a show of nonchalance to any hidden foes. 

No sense in giving away his wariness, after all.

"_Thinking, eh_? _An effort on your part, I'm sure_," piped Alastor after a beat, evidently having developed some hesitancy after its master's cutting remarks. Dante had to admit the spirit was hiding its tentativeness well, so he decided to give it a break, and let its retort slide. "You hate my guts, I hate yours," he said easily, as if he had just stated that fish swim, and birds fly. "But what do you think about my line of work?"

A moment of doubtful silence, then, "_I don't follow, mongrel_. _Are....you asking me how I _feel_ about the killing of my brethren?_" Then, in menacing tone, "_If this be a trick...._"

"No trick."

Alastor grunted noncommittally, but the hunter could tell the lightning spirit was relieved. 

"_I feel no remorse_," the wraith continued with mounting confidence. "_My world is eternal anguish to the weak; only the strong know how sweet true power is. There are countless many, all seeking greatness while crushing the hapless beneath their heels. What your weapons offer is merciful compared to the agony suffered by those that are too feeble to defend themselves_." 

Then, in growing bitterness, "_Why do you ask this of me_?_ Am I damning myself - my kind - even further in your eyes_? _Did your family's murder inspire that insatiable thirst for blood_?_ You live day by day for the hunt; am I adding to the dark vengeance in your heart_?_ Or perhaps fueling an even darker, savage desire _- 

"Enough!"

- _one that only your diabolical half can know_?_ -_

"I said enough!"

__

- Poor mommy....poor Vergil...."

Alastor let out an involuntary yell as Dante swung the blade into the ground with tremendous force. A dull, yet profound ring, like that of a giant bell, rang out in all directions. He couldn't see the fractured stone beneath the water's surface, though the bubbles told him of the air pocket that was already filling. The hunter could feel his heart pounding uncomfortably fast. He had to swallow a lung-full of air - hold it, let it out slowly - to rid himself of the knot in his chest, the butterflies in his stomach. He didn't think to move from his striking stance - legs apart, both hands on Alastor's grip, the sword point still grinding against the submerged stone floor before him. When he opened his eyes - when did he close them? - it was almost a convulsive action that he wrenched the blade from the ground. He stood regarding the unnatural weapon at arms length, watched dirty droplets caress a path down the metal's reflective face, its edge. 

The hunter was badly stunned. His distress came from at least two sources: Why - _how _- had he allowed Alastor to influence his emotions when he knew of the devil spirit's manipulative nature? And: Why had he even cared what the lightning wraith thought about his actions toward its kin? For a second, the red clad hunter feared that by opening up his thoughts to Alastor - and he was quickly becoming certain that he had done just that - that he had given away too much of himself. Never had he told the spirit - mentally or aloud - of the deaths of his mother and brother, let alone the revenge he quested after. Though his own actions could have betrayed that very desire, he doubted Alastor had had enough time to make the connection. The half-devil regarded the blade, home to a conniving, opportunistic resident. He could hear it chuckling, low and malevolent.

"Son of a bitch," he half-whispered, anger stealing away some of the sting of Alastor's words. "I can't give you even the slightest inch without you screwing with my head."

"_I gladly suffer your company for moments such as this_," chortled the deceptive devil wraith. "_What did you expect_?" it asked with scorn. "_After the disrespect you showed me_!_ "An eye for an eye", did you know that is the gospel truth where I come from_?_ What is the matter_? _You wanted to know more about me only a moment ago...._?"

Dante was livid. He was mortified. Anger, at both Alastor, and his own carelessness, seethed, burned in the blood that threatened to make him flush crimson. _No way_ was he giving the little bastard spirit the satisfaction of making him blush.He had opened up enough of himself to the unruly spirit for it to take a cheapshot at him. It had immediately preyed upon his hidden weaknesses, even twisting his own desires into something wholly wicked and vile, instead of the necessity they really were, the _right_ he felt owed to himself. Dante spoke with lethal calm."Go ahead, push me a little further. I am within a _millimeter _of burying you hilt deep up the next demon's ass I see, and leaving you there to rust!"

"_Hah_! _Idle threats_!"jeered the arrogant sword. "_If you leave me _anywhere _it would be to your disadvantage. A normal blade of steel, like the Force Edge, would be hard pressed to slay any of the _real _threats I'm sure that are to come your way. Admit it_!_ I win this bout, _mongrel fool!"Alastor resumed its hardy chuckle. Unfortunately, the red clad hunter had to admit defeat in that aspect. He had been wondering - during the evil spirit's rant - the reason for his moment of foolishness. He decided it wasn't an attempt to understand Alastor's personality, or opinions, but to understand its race as a whole. Dante resolved, even as Alastor finally shut up, that he was only trying to make sense of the death of his family. Overall was his need to avenge them, and himself, of the injustice, of the cruelty they suffered. It was natural - wasn't it? - to strive to understand the motive for their deaths, so that it did not appear as senseless as it had to his young eyes. He wanted their sacrifice to have _meaning_, a motive behind the deed - no matter how sick and perverse, as long as it wasn't by chaotic chance, or capricious Fate - and what better way to understand the enemy than to ask one? But, it seemed, he would get nothing from this particular devil.

Dante took a deep breath that hissed between his teeth. It took him but a moment to steady himself back to his usual cool self. The sentient devil arms - which he, curiously enough, no longer felt anger towards - was placed onto his shoulder once more, and he resumed his walk.

"_Will that be all, then, mongrel_?"Alastor queried in mock boredom, obviously enjoying the game. The devil hunter smiled, then, a small thing that inspired a rumble of laughter deep in his throat. It was a quiet sound, and for some reason, Alastor did not feel all that superior anymore."_I win,_" snapped the spirit. "_You can say nothing. You cannot take away my victory. I've put you in your place._"

It sounded like a plea.

Dante passed beneath an archway of crumbling stone blocks, temporarily putting out of his mind yet another service tunnel leading into the wall at his left. "Yeah, okay, fine," the hunter said, completely in agreement. "You really told me a thing or two, alright....a lot of interesting things...."

"..._What do you mean by that_?"rasped Alastor in undeniable spite. The hunter could easily picture the devil wraith backing into a corner as it spoke.

"Nothing, I'm in total agreement with you," Dante said lightly, innocently. "I can't discard you. I need you to put down Hell's top bruisers. You're an asset. Of course Force Edge would be nearly ineffective for the job, that's why your presence is so necessary."

"_No..._"breathed Alastor, finally understanding its folly.

Dante's smile widened, knowing exactly what his words meant to the desperate spirit. "I guess your freedom will just have to wait until I defeat all of the Underworld....but _wait_, didn't you say there were "countlessmany" of you? Tch, tough nuts, pal."

"_NO_!_ You are a mortal worm_! _Weak, and prone to mortal weaknesses_!_ There will be one of the Underworld that will slay you, there must_!"

"But when will that happen, do you think?" Dante asked in a most pointed fashion, enjoying this dark game of cat-and-mouse. "A decade, two. What if I die of old age, huh? Maybe I'll have you buried with me?"

Alastor's cry trembled in horrified denial. Its hissing/crackling pitch rose painfully sharp, making the hunter wince, though it never diminished the satisfaction he felt. The unnatural howl was fully one of helpless defiance, tinged with impotent rage, colored by raw hate. Alastor knew, that in preying upon its wielder, it too, had revealed too much of itself. Never had its ultimate want - to be free and wreak evil in the proper hands - been so laid bare, so savaged by the harsh reality of its station. It was a slave to righteous fury in the possession of a half-breed so obviously against its very existence. As the incoherent cry faded into deep misery, Alastor knew defeat, felt it intimately.

Dante's leisurely gait had taken him well beyond the point of entry, and the fog before him parted steadily with every step. When his searching gaze came to rest upon objects entirely unrelated to the waterway environment, he stopped. 

Chasm: Don't cliffhangers just rankle the nerves? Though I have to say, this one is mild compared to some others I've encountered. I kinda felt sorry for Alastor after this one, same with Dante too. Doesn't pay to screw with either of their minds, huh? I'm a little surprised no ones been curious enough to ask questions, like: What's the difference between devils and demons? 

I'm fine with that, though. If readers feel they can fill in the holes themselves that's just fine, I'm content by simply posting good material for others to read, then getting feedback. There should be action on the way, so no worries. 


	5. Evil of the Waterways

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine, but Alastor's a**hole personality is. Hmmm, I think I'll rate this chapter **PG**-**13. **You'll see....

Orin Drake: Nice to know you're still around and enjoying the fic.

Rusty: Viko4ever: Hahaha! How can I turn down such enthusiasm. Tell you what, an explanation here would be too unsightly, so it'll be in the next chapter. 

**** __

They were torch-like lantern of twisted silver-blue metal. There were four of them, each spaced out equally to form a fifteen-by-fifteen foot square just above the water's surface. Silent azure flame danced within, not giving off heat, but reeking of death. Here the odor of sulfur and decay mingled to near eye-watering proportions. Their placement divided the waterway almost from left to right wall, affording only a foot and a half of space outside its perimeter. The only way for one to cross would be to walk through the boxed area, or skim close to either wall. Either way, it was trapped. 

The red clad hunter sat on his haunches just outside the perimeter, calmly working out the possibilities in his head. It was a trap, of that he was sure, but what form would this less-than-subtle deception take? His blue gaze traveled up the slime-encrusted wall. A ram's skull - too large to have belonged to anything but the largest bull - was mounted halfway up the right-hand wall. 

And the only way to properly inspect it was to stand within the lanterns' boundary.

Dante was sure he didn't want to do that. His keen eyes traced the skull's bone structure. The empty sockets seemed to glare down at him, the jagged "muzzle" appeared to grin, but the most noteworthy feature were the dead creature's horns. Curved, and ribbed, the desiccated bones ended in needle points. What's more, were their peculiar color, it was faded, but there could be no doubt: crimson. 

Dante stood, ignoring the dripping state of his coattails, his mind's eye back in Devil May Cry. Of all the mounted trophy heads in his office, only two of which had been acquired without a fight. Various jobs had sent him to various parts of the world, and every now and then, he found the remains of an Underworld denizen. For whatever the cause of its ruin - be it infighting, or treachery - the devil hunter cared only that he hadn't dealt the deathblow. 

He had collected the masks of two such spawn, the horned skull of what he later identified as a Death Scissor, and the twisted mask of a Nobody. The hunter had often sat in his favorite chair, gazed at his free prizes, and wondered how a fight against them would have turned out. Would he face off with the most deadly of Scissors, now? Only eight years into the business, and Dante was ever amazed that he had yet to encounter _every_ hellkin form. 

In the vague hope of springing the trap prematurely, the half-devil stretched his massive sword into the danger zone. Nothing. With his half-hearted plan foiled, Dante tapped one of the lanterns with the tip of his boot, and grunted vaguely. Looking across the trapped area, he knew he could make the leap with zero sweat.

But that was too easy.

He could quickly scuttle around the obstacle in question.

But he knew it was pointless.

"Hell with this," he sighed, simultaneously anticipating a confrontation, and praying the trap's actual nature was not instant death.

Ah, the hazards of the work place.

Dante stepped forward, Alastor at the ready....and sprung the trap.

No sooner did he clear the perimeter did the four "lanterns" reveal their true function. They shot up as if fired from a cannon, only to stop abruptly six feet above the waterline. The "lanterns" had become pole-like staffs, wholly grotesque and foul in nature, for they were composed entirely of dried muscle, sinew, and the long, yellowed bones of both human and animal, alike. 

Repulsed, the hunter twitched away from the sordid constructs. That same instant, like a shiver in the air, a barrier shimmered to life, spanning between staffs, extending to the walls, the ceiling, and all but invisible. Bolts as black as pitch, yet radiating an unholy blue, split into many fingers, coiling around the corpse staffs, and attaching themselves onto floor and ceiling, wall to wall. If not for those bands of energy, Dante had no other way to detect the barrier except by touch. He sensed hellish taint dangerously close by, and his intense green stare fell upon the mounted skull. 

He thought about coaxing the evil entity out with a well placed insult, but it needed no urging. 

In the once-vacant sockets blinked eyes that were little more than burning emerald pinpoints. Reeking of death, the apparition emerged from the mounted skull, rearing as a snake would, brandishing enormous, shear-like scissors. The giant blades - gently curved inward like pincers - forced Dante to backpedal away, for they were as long as he was tall. Sharing some characteristics of a Sin devil - a tattered, ethereal cloak of darkness, and ghostly, skeletal hands - the resemblance ended with its predominant features: its weaponry, and its ghastly head. 

As frightening as its arsenal was - darkened with old stains Dante didn't care to guess at - it could not compare to the murderous look in the creature's hellfire green eyes. Where a Sin's ornate mask might have been placed, there instead rode a ram's skull quite unlike its mounted counterpart. While the dead thing on the wall was worn, and flaking bone, its twin seemed unnaturally alive - even slick - despite the lack of flesh. While the horns of one were faded of its red hue, the other verily pulsed with malignant, blood red vitality. 

Is this what I think it is? Dante thought to Alastor. 

When the obstinate spirit didn't answer, and the scissor devil's baritone growl began vibrating the air, the hunter purred in an ominous tone, "Better answer. Remember what I said about the next devil I saw?"

The devil creature's growl abruptly cut off with a confused turn of the head. 

Was the man-thing speaking to it? 

Alastor's irritated reply came with a crackle of blue electricity. "_No, you said _demon_, not devil, and this one does not appear to possess the required nether region. Besides_," the spirit sniffed, "_you said I was an asset_."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Dante shot back. "I meant to say _asshole_!"

Insulted, or perhaps tired of the one sided conversation - Alastor could not be heard by any but its wielder - the horned devil roared. It tried to snip off the hunter's head, but a quick duck-and-parry foiled the attempt.

Is it a Death Scissor? Dante mentally asked; this time, he would brook no argument from his unruly partner. Fiery eyes left green tracers of light in their wake as the creature shot up into the ceiling. 

"Caedere Mortis, _yes_," Alastor said solemnly. "_Cutting Death, the ancient scholars had dubbed them_." The lightning spirit laughed, "_Or Death Scissors, as the scholars had been so corrected, to their ultimate regret_."

Alastor's cackling was drowned out the next instant by a guttural howl. Dante turned, eyes fixing upon the section of ceiling from which the howl had emanated. He blinked and missed the devil's high speed materialization, but heard it all too clearly. He spun away with Alastor raised to parry, felt his weapon briefly make contact, the air at his left flank shrieking as the Death Scissor tore past, disappearing into the floor. Dante was more than a little perturbed when he saw Alastor splash down a few feet away. Heart pounding with the implications of being disarmed he rushed over to the submerged blade. 

Reaching fingers barely broke the waterline when another roar sounded from behind, and to the right. Left with little choice Dante pulled Force Edge free from its scabbard while twisting around. He saw the Scissor come out of the haze just outside the barrier - pass through the barrier as if it were air! - and knew he _did not _want to meet the charge head on. What he realized then was the devil's mode of attack: a terrible corkscrew spin with its fearsome weapon leading! It would literally drill through his defenses, tear him apart, and that's _if _he had any defense left to guard with. 

He held Force Edge in his hands, not Alastor, after all. 

The skull-headed devil growled savagely, bearing in horribly fast. Dante jerked to the side, Force Edge snapping in with a backhand meant to deflect, and took a nasty hit on its flat. Even prepared for the disarmament, the blade nearly flew from the hunter's tingling fingers. Force Edge - a blade difficult to mar - now flaunted numerous, fine scratches in a swirling pattern on one side. Dante's attention snapped from Force Edge to the sound of yet another animalistic bellow, this time from the ground....at his feet! 

Huge scissors thrashed the dark waters into a rabid froth the closer it ascended. Curved blades blasted from the water's surface, but its target had hopped away scant seconds before. Still, the whirring scissors glanced off Dante's belt buckle, rose up to nick the side of his jaw. He cursed loudly at the close call, cursed again when the Scissors slowed dramatically to a stop, and faced him directly, its weapon held low. 

Hunter and hunted stared each other down. 

Dante didn't look away, never considered it. His mind worked furiously to fully understand this devil's capabilities. Where did its strengths lie, its weaknesses? He figured he was right to assume the wraith-like devil relied heavily on shear ferocity. It was power, more than speed, that it favored, and Dante was fairly confident he could exploit that. But, were those the weaknesses that would doom the evil entity? 

Diabolic eyes flashed emerald.

Gurgling laughter erupted from the devil's empty maw as it brought its weapon about with a great _whoosh_! twirling it around and around in a lethal ring. Despite the attack's suddenness, the red clad hunter was rapidly adapting. With growing ease he anticipated the trajectory of each swing. 

Thrice, a high slice sped in, but found no neck to sever. Twice, a low arc audibly cut the air, but slashed no limbs. The Death Scissor's eyes flared with the knowledge it was losing the initiative. Deadly scissors spun about with renewed vigor as the non-spirit hovered forward, hoping to herd the agile half-devil further away from Alastor, and finish him in a corner. Dante had watched the devil's mounting frustration, and was ready. When the orbiting scissors passed impotently overhead, the hunter responded with a powerful swing of his own blade. Force Edge interrupted the Scissor's return strike with a sharp peal of metal on metal. Dante wore a cocky grin. 

"You're not so tough!"

So he had been right, its real strength lay in its rush attack. The Death Scissor gave a feral growl, and with a deft twist of the wrists, the monstrous scissor blades had clamped onto Force Edge. The devil ground its fleshless jaws in what could have been a smile, then heaved upward. Force Edge flew end over end past the creature's shoulder, but the hunter was already moving. In sacrificing the lesser sword, he had given himself precious few seconds for a lunge at Alastor. 

Barely able to discern Alastor's outline in the inky water, Dante lurched for the dragon hilt -

- and came up empty!

The Death Scissor looked away from Force Edge's flight - gurgling in satisfaction - and didn't see the hunter helpless before it. Beginning to understand the depth of its distraction, it frantically glanced around -

- as a black gloved hand found Alastor's hilt, scant inches from where it fell.

The non-spirit saw the devil arms freed of its watery shroud, and screeched in fury. Dante dove away as closed scissor blades speared torward him. Such was the fierceness of the Scissor's attacks that Dante didn't dare stand to counter. Each evasive roll earned him a hair's breadth of breathing space, a span that threatened to close with the slightest slip-up. Curved blades pierced the water - the stone underneath - and it was then that Alastor spoke. 

"_Some advise: Die quickly. It will hurt less_," it said, eager to "help".

Dante didn't waste time in a reply. He fought dizziness as the Scissor mercilessly pursued him around the death trap. The unnaturally murky water soaked him thoroughly, weighing his clothes, though a distant part of him concerned more over wet shotgun shells. No, the water's pull didn't bother him as it would a normal human, instead, it affected him in a way he hadn't guessed. 

It streamed from his hair into his eyes, stinging them like a wasp's sting. The tainted water invaded his mouth, ears, nose, burning with something vaguely chemical, and he suddenly couldn't dismiss the stench of sulfur. Dante felt scissors stab into the cloth of a trailing coattail, and knew he better stop eating shit if he wanted to keep breathing. 

Anger-boosted reflexes powered Dante through one final roll. He was on his feet in a blink, taking sweet satisfaction in the Death Scissor's shocked reaction. It feebly shielded its face with its weapon as it began to float away - 

- and the hunter's eyes narrowed as Alastor bashed away its defenses.

As with the Sins, the mask was the devils' corporeal form. Was the Scissor's death mask truly its vulnerability? The hunter didn't want to convince himself into attacking a perceived weakness. 

One way to find out... 

The Death Scissor was recovering its guard when Ebony and Ivory appeared, spitting punishment. At pointblank range, the force of high-speed lead drove the terrible devil back, its horrendous shrieks of fear and animal rage bordering the insane. Bone chips flew wildly wherever a bullet tore in, fracturing, splintering the fine lines of an eye socket, exploding into grinding teeth, the curves of screaming jaws. Dante pressed the attack, driving the doomed devilkin toward the energy barrier closest to the portcullis. The cowering devil seemed to wilt as it slowly sank to the ground. 

It didn't think to scurry away, couldn't manage to shake the confusion that had hooked merciless claws into its psyche. How had the wretched man-thing slipped through its onslaught? It had fully believed in its superiority, believed the kill was imminent....only to have its ecstasy come to a chilling, ripping halt. The Death Scissor nearly crippled itself with the terror only a servant of Mundus could feel. It could not fail! 

It wanted to please its cruel master -

- Bullets chewed into the ram skull -

To fulfill His dark decrees to the letter -

- dug into the thick bone of its forehead -

To gain status in His favor -

- bit into ridged, crimson horns -

And all it took -

- a curved horn disintegrated in the rain of lead -

Was one death!

Pain as cold as glacial ice lanced in with fiery barbs, rending into the Death Scissor's very core. Dante knew he had discovered the hellspawn's Achilles heel in its scream of anguish, but the longer he watched, the more he knew he was going to wish he hadn't. Ebony and Ivory grew still in their assault. 

The Death Scissor furiously shook its grotesque head, the pitted and cracked visage suddenly erupting in ghostly fire. The red aura of flame enveloped the damaged skull, the non-spirit's deathly hands, but burning brightest of all were the eyes. Piercing eyes of emerald were the promise of unspeakable death, and any lesser being would have balked at the sight of such overwhelming evil. 

Dante had faced worse, and he shrugged off the initial dread easily enough. Still, pitted against this unknown without any real knowledge of its capabilities, and with new surprises popping up every second, he began to question the wisdom of stepping into the trap. 

The devil's transformation, even the hunter's musings, happened within the span of seconds.

The Death Scissor roared in, glowing red hot. Long scissor blades gapped wide like the eager jaws of a mammoth insect. Gone were the hunter's dual pistols, replaced by the gleaming length of Alastor's razor edge held out vertically before him. Too wide, were the scissor's cutting embrace, too fast was the lunging non-spirit, and the red clad hunter could do nothing more than brace himself. Guttural, maniacal laughter invaded his world as gaping scissor blades collided into Alastor with staggering force. Sparks sprayed the air between the combatants. Dante slid back on his heels, though he tried to resist, coming to an abrupt stop against the opposite energy wall. If he hadn't been so preoccupied at that moment, he would have felt some relief that the trap-barrier did not harm or hurt. Harmless though it was, it remained unyielding as the stone beneath his boots. 

Solid for me, the hunter corrected. Not for him.

To either side of his straining shoulders a scissor blade extended about three feet beyond the shimmering barrier. The Death Scissor growled like a rabid beast as it pushed forward. Dante pushed back with all his strength.

The _heat_!

Infernal flames wrapped around the skull radiated stinging warmth and the smell of disease. The scorching air evaporated sweat as quickly as it was summoned, burned into oxygen-starved lungs, blurred vision in waves of heat. 

"_I was wondering, mongrel_," mused Alastor, as if nothing particularly eventful was happening. "_Will anyone mourn you when you die_? _Oh, by the way, you've enraged our friend here, that's why you are within inches of death_." The lightning spirit sighed regrettably. "_Should have taken its horns, then bashed its skull in...._" 

You _knew _how to kill this thing? Dante thought accusingly at the spirit.

The Death Scissor pressed in with frightening suddenness, simultaneously snapping its scissors shut with a dramatic burst of strength. Dante reacted instinctively, raising Alastor up and diagonally above his head, as he ducked down, and away. The one-horned devil's own powerful rush sent it into a helpless slid over the sentient sword's edge, momentum carrying it safely beyond the barrier before it could even consider clamping onto Alastor itself. Dante was instantly on his feet. He saw the Death Scissor retreat into a wall, laughing, and already beginning the dreaded corkscrew spin. 

"You _knew_!" Dante growled angrily.

"_Of course_," came the matter-of-fact reply. "_As I said, I am bound into service. Therefore, I am forced to assist you in my own...special...way_." 

The Death Scissor shot in faster than ever before, and it was all the hunter could do to dart away.

"You never said anything before now," the hunter argued back.

"_Ha_! _You never asked_!"

"Since when do I have to -"

Cloudy water frothed, and Dante dodged away from yet another near-fatal charge.

"_Oooo_! _Close one_!" taunted Alastor. "_Truly, I have enjoyed watching you squirm, but I do not wish to be claimed by a brute like the Death Scissor. Worry not, its rage will subside soon enough. Then, and _only _then, may you strike_."

"Thanks, coach," was the acidic reply. 

Taint and the Scissor's roar told Dante it would emerge from the wall behind him. 

Instead of evading - as the powered-up non-spirit expected - the hunter dashed into a dead run as he swung Alastor hard at the emerging devil. Shredding scissors were soon followed by the fiery skull -

- and blue lightning crackled with the screech of metal scraping off bone. A single, fat spark erupted on contact as the Death Scissor took the full force of Alastor's edge on its remaining horn. The devil arms ricochet harmlessly off the impervious bone, to bite deeply into the stonework wall. Stunned out of its spin by the shear audacity of the half-devil man-thing, the Death Scissor slowly turned around. The non-spirit let its weaponry dangle from one ghostly hand as it met the hunter's chill glare. 

Curious.... 

The man-thing had not moved, even after he had trapped his blade in stone. What's more, the defiant mortal glared back with such indomitable defiance, the Death Scissor suspected the stare had never left its back. Why did he continue to fight? the burning devil wondered with frustration. Why did he insist on making a mockery of its existence by resisting it? When so many others had fallen? 

Most curious.

Despite the savagery that ruled within the Death Scissor's very being, it paused a moment to consider the true nature of what it fought....

Only a moment.

With a terrific cry of what sounded very much like "die!", the false-wraith took up its formidable arms. Dante wrenched the massive broadsword from its stony grip as the devil dipped in, scissor blades ready to snip him in half. He dove between the closing blades with inches to spare, the sound they made like that of an oversized bear trap.

"_What did I just tell you, mongrel_?" hissed Alastor heatedly. "_No killing until its aura of fury has dissipated_." 

Snapping scissors followed the hunter's every dodge, every roll, hounding him the length and width of the death trap. 

His light's about to go out, thought Dante pointedly. Can't you sense it?

The sound of clapping razor blades deafened him in one ear, but the agile hunter didn't concern himself with the close call. 

"_What_?" a perplexed Alastor blurted. "_You can perceive taint that precisely_? _But -_ "

"You never asked! Now, shut up!"

As Alastor inserted the proverbial foot-in-mouth, Dante laughed as he walked the razor's edge of dodging for his life, and playing with the Death Scissor. By initially bashing the devil upside the head, most of the fight had left it, even though he had never physically hurt it. Dante figured he had wounded its pride. Lord knows that _he _didn't get his smug personality from his _mother._ And if there was one thing the hunting business had taught him, it was that all hellspawn possessed overdeveloped pride....and they didn't like it fucked with.

All he had to do was wear the Death Scissor down a little more....

Growling furiously, the manic non-spirit picked up the pace, realizing through its frenzy that its boosted form was fading fast. So frantic did the massive scissors open and close that they made a single ringing clangor, as opposed to a stuttering cacophony. The part of Dante's mind that wasn't preoccupied with saving his own skin, thought it was the funniest damn thing he'd seen in a long while. He tried, though couldn't immediately dispel images that came to mind of a gardener with pruning shears going postal, spitting and crazy-eyed. 

Crazed by its inability to touch its prey in its transformed state, the sight of the grinning devil hunter pushed the Death Scissor beyond tolerance. The flaming aura fizzled with its scream of abject fury as it launched one final attack with the last of its fading power. Dante sensed, more than saw, the darkly stained blades converging around him horrifyingly fast. The jaws of curved razors closed in a blur of motion, and he defended the only way he could. To an observer, Ebony simply appeared in his left hand, but instead of firing the gun, the hunter caught an incoming blade with the side of the barrel, while Alastor thwarted the other. 

The Death Scissor squeezed.

Though the strength behind the dual blades was immense, it was no longer unstoppable. The desperate false-wraith growled and mewled with effort, steadily gaining headway a millimeter at a time. Dante was impressed, in spite of himself. 

It took guts to fight till the bitter end.

Burning emerald eyes glanced furtively at Ebony, and the hunter knew why. Blessed with infinite ammunition through arcane ritual, Ebony made a lethal pair with Ivory, but neither was made to withstand a swordfight. Sustained pressure against a razor's edge was gouging the black metal itself, and Dante thought now was a good time to end the duel.

Gonna take weeks to buff that out, dammit! he mentally winced. 

The hunter lay steady eyes on his prey. "Don't you get it, friend?" he calmly began telling the false-wraith with a grin. The Death Scissor didn't want to hear this, didn't want to wait and listen to the man-thing _finish_. Fear predominated its defiance as it released its hold on Ebony with the hope of slicing into the hunter's forearm. 

The Scissor nearly reeled with relief when the blade sank home. 

It looked into the eyes of the hunter, and let out an involuntary moan. 

Though pain seared him to the bone, Dante willed himself not to flinch, not even blink. He shook his head as his smile became a touch predatory.

"Just thought I needed to clarify," he said. "_You_ are _my _bitch."

The Death Scissor gave a screech of stubborn refusal as it moved to saw off the hunter's injured limb -

- but it wasn't facing the hunter anymore.

Jagged snakes of blue electricity flicked constantly in, over, between, the obsidian armor of the devil knight. Wintry was the inhuman gaze that flashed from narrow eye-slits, glowing with the same intensity as the flickering aura that was like a cloak. The materialization of the black armor bit a neat semicircle into the blade still in the knight's arm, causing the Death Scissor to pull back abruptly with sudden dread.

It would not _fail_!

It snapped at the devil knight for a quick kill -

- but suddenly it was staggering under waves of agony.

It grasped the stump of its severed horn in horrified disbelief. Thinking of only one maneuver that might save it, the devil shot away, already beginning the spin.

Like a statue, the glowing knight stood motionless in a relaxed stance, Alastor held loosely in one gauntleted hand. He heard the roar approaching from behind, but made no move. A rear strike was too obvious, therefore, the Death Scissor would double-back, would come from a different direction. 

Head on!

The non-spirit emerged with a triumphant howl, a howl that turned sour with the realization that the knight had called its bluff. Committed to its course, it charged headlong, and it all ended in a bright blur.

The devil knight spun away, taking up Alastor before the Scissor finished shooting by. The gleaming blade stabbed harmlessly up the ethereal black cloak of the fleeing devil, finding the empty cavity of its skull, and hooked on as the knight redirected its flight. Up and over and down went the screaming Death Scissor, to crack violently onto the flooded ground. Red blood orbs exploded from the pulverized bone and were absorbed by the knight that same instant. 

Energy fizzled, and the trap-walls popped out of existence. Barrier-staffs self-destructed without the power of their master to sustain them, blasting bits of mummified human, and animal bone in all directions. Giant scissors blew apart in a cloud of shrapnel, the slivers of metal bouncing harmlessly off obsidian full-plate. 

Empty sockets where emerald fires had once burned became dust and a bad memory in mere seconds. The last vestiges of a wraithlike cloak fluttered to nothing when the knight ceased to be, and the aura-shrouded hunter stood tall. 

"_You're never going to use the shotgun at this rate, mongrel_," Alastor commented wryly.

Dante freed his hands of Alastor and Ebony to favor his left arm. "Maybe," confessed Dante. "But why should I if Ebony and Ivory have a kill list the length of a city block?" 

The wound in his forearm resisted healing thanks to the severed edge of a scissor blade embedded therein, and he quickly tried to work it free. Infection didn't worry him - many ailments were beyond the power to affect him - but he loathed the thought of his flesh healing over the unnatural shard. It came loose after a minute, and the momentary flare of pain was soon replaced by Alastor's speedy regenerative power. The hunter willed the power away once the bleeding was under control. 

"_As you wish.....and were you _trying_ to get yourself killed for my benefit, or are you simply that dense_?" 

"I did it 'cause I'm just that good," Dante drawled as he looked around for the fallen Force Edge. He couldn't help but grin when he found the smaller sword. Buried halfway into the mounted ram skull's forehead, Dante thought it was a wonderfully ironic sight.

"_Bah! You're lucky you didn't lose the limb; you could have easily blocked with Ebony. Bad enough I must serve a mongrel half-breed, but I did not relish the thought of being wielded by a _cripple."

Dante retrieved Force Edge with a flourish, then put it in its rightful place. He began walking as he drew Alastor.

"Oh please! I haven't survived up until now by overestimating my abilities, when are you going to see that?"

The lightning spirit was adamant. "_It was a needless show of bravado, end-of-story_."

"Maybe, but did you catch the look in that devil's eyes? Fear like that isn't easily faked....hel-lo....?"

Turning the corner led nowhere, but it was what lay in the dead end that was reason for pause. Pitch burned with orange flames in twin, bowl-shaped sconces. The wall-bound sconces flanked an arched alcove, alighting a carving of a sun within. The closed expression of a small child or baby composed the sun's "face", while a crown of triangular shapes gave the impression of waves of heat. 

Most noteworthy of all, was an elegant stone pedestal standing before the child-sun's face, a small object resting conspicuously upon it. Slowly stepping into warm torchlight, Dante tapped Alastor gently against his shoulder in thought. "Shrine" was the hunter's first deduction, but a closer inspection said differently. 

Not a shrine, he mused to himself. But something no less significant.

Receding were the memories of his most recent fight for life, to be replaced by an enigma of the present. 

A key sat atop the pedestal, and did he get too much water in the eyes, or was the item....glowing, ever-so-slightly? The head of the key was an embellished imitation of the sun carving -

- and the words of an inscription scribed below the bronze grin of a merry sun came to mind. 

"These images....wasn't there something like them in that bedchamber?" 

" "_The brightness of the Guiding Light will scorch you_", " Alastor intoned. " "_Only those that can bear the Light can open the new path_." "

"That's the one," the hunter confirmed. Then, with less certainty, "But I don't remember seeing a keyhole near the sun figurine. Could this key be used for something else?"

"_Possibly_," admitted Alastor. "_But there's only one way to find out, yes_?" 

Dante wiped his left hand through his wet hair, ignoring the dull ache in his mending muscles, and admitted, "Sure, why not? That kind of logic's been working for me so far." 

Since Underworld taint did not cling here - like it had for the Death Scissor trap - he grabbed the key without a second thought -

- and nearly swooned with vertigo.

He quickly replaced the glowing key onto its pedestal, but the ill effects would not leave him be. Shaking his head, blinking rapidly....nothing helped. "Forget "scorch"," he said. "Damn key is -"

" - _draining your life essence_? _I thought it might._ _Don't worry, it isn't fatal....in the short-term. Tell me, who are your next of kin_?" 

The hunter steadied himself with a hand to the wall, but he quickly realized any relief would be temporary. He retrieved the key once more, and pocketed it. "Your concern is touching," Dante told the spirit as he began a loping run for the exit. "Remind me to snap you in half when I'm done saving humanity."

**...**

From the shadowed tunnel beyond the portcullis, a figure watched. The figure observed with great interest as the red clad hunter intentionally sprung the trap, marveled at the Death Scissor's dramatic fall, and was amused at the obvious trade of dialogue between the devil arms, Alastor, and its master. Though the figure couldn't hear the spirit's words, it mattered little. The hunter had survived the tests laid before him...

And with flying colors, no less, the figure thought with measured admiration

The hunter had just acquired the Guiding Light, was weakened by it, and the leather clad figure concentrated her thoughts to form telepathic speech.

"_He's yours Phantom_," Trish relayed. She knew the hard-shelled demon would be gathering itself for an explosive entrance somewhere - be it walls or floor or ceiling - and it would be an impressive show of brute strength. She wished she could be there to witness it. Unfortunately, duty in the form of Mundus's rumbling command dictated she be elsewhere.

How will you fare, son of Sparda? she wondered with more than a little curiosity, especially since she knew his path would only become much more difficult. How many more tests will you pass? 

Will your strength save you, or will my master take you, like he took your family? 

It was unnervingly difficult for Trish to align herself with either possibility. 

She turned away, undecided.

Chasm: *audibly cracks knuckles* I feel like going linear, so I'm going to do the next mission - just like in the game. Beware, I have angst in mind....


	6. Intermission: Things in the Dark

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine. This version of Alastor's personality is mine, as well as the majority of the ideas listed below.

Mip the Demon Fox: I thought about novelizing the whole game, but its harder than you may think. I'll just keep creating chapters until the finale with Mundus.

Tiger5913: Trish has appeared, but I'm not sure for how long. She wasn't just sitting on her hands the entire game I think, so I had her spy on Dante for kicks.

A/N: (Updated) This chapter fleshes out some of the hierarchy, social structure, and job classes in the Underworld as I envision it. Everything is based on DMC 1's enemy list, not 2.

Things in the Dark

**Devils**: All are humanoid, or have human-like traits. Mundus, Sparda, Nero Angelo, Trish - are examples of the more powerful incarnations of devil kind. Death Scissor, Plasma, Death Scythe, and Fetish - are next in line. Lastly: Sin Scythe, Sin Scissor, Bloody Mari, the common Marionette, and the Sargasso - have the lowest power level of devils. Rank is determined by an individual's intelligence, physical prowess, and arcane abilities (like Trish's electrical powers). All devils are naturally cunning.

Devils are born leaders, and generally more diplomatic than demons. They are the most likely candidates to mingle in the human world (like Sparda). They tend to gain rank and power through elaborate machinations - the shadier, the better - rather than by brute force, though that option is open to them. Devils are the cruelest tormentors of the mind (Mundus using the image of Dante's mother and brother against him). Only a devil may become a knight, that being the highest station attainable, short of Emperor.

**Demons**: All are bestial, or have a corrupt form. Griffon, Phantom - are examples of the more powerful incarnations of demon kind. Frosts, Kyklops, Blades, and Shadows - are next in line. Lastly: the Nobody, and the Beelzebub.

Demons are generally out to prey on others weaker than themselves in the most direct way possible. They favor a pack mentality. When aroused for battle, they are often too lost in their own animalistic tendencies to speak (like the first ingame appearance of the Blades).

Demons are born for violence, and they thrive during wartime. They respond well to those stronger than themselves, but they aren't devoid of freewill - they will resist suicidal orders. They favor brute force over intrigue - though it's still an option - and enjoy dealing physical pain over psychological torture. Like devils, they are naturally cunning. When there is a demon of exceptional smarts, it is usually a force onto itself (Griffon, Phantom). Demons can become Generals of their Emperor's army - a job where one _must _throw one's weight around. The position of General is a demon's highest station attainable.

**Emperor**: It is a well deserved status to any spawn that can obtain it, but it is another matter entirely to hold it. For a would-be Emperor to gain the throne, it is by far more advantageous to be in the current ruler's family, than to be outside the royal line. All Emperors must be wary of their blood relations. Ironically, their presence is necessary to pass on the throne, for an intelligent ruler would rather be usurped by a deserving kin-member than another spawn of low rank. Since the beginning of the Devil Kingdom, the Emperor has trained fighters of vast skill to protect him: the devil knights. The Emperors of old were spoiled by the knights' exceptional prowess, and quickly grew covetous of their numbers (no knights exist outside of the Emperor's court anymore). And so it is because of this ageless prejudice that keeps demons from knighthood.

Every Emperor has swollen ambitions of totally dominating their slice of the Underworld. Unfortunately, some petty faction or noble House is always making war on his neighbor, usually stirring up a civil war that lasts centuries. The Emperor is then forced to quell the fighting, and effort that constantly curbs his rule-all plans. One might think the role of Emperor not worth the inherent risk and aggravation, but it is only through dictatorship that _any _spawn can potentially achieve their one, collective desire: to savage the land of humans for evil's sake, and use the slaughter they create to spit in the eye of Heaven's creator for _ever _banishing them.

It wasn't until the prince of the most recent ruler decided on a different tactic. Without the cooperation of most, if not all of the Devil Kingdom, the what was the point of dreaming of sweet Armaggedon? By snatching the throne, and promoting his desire to conquer the human world, he would unite the Underworld under his standard and lay waste to the mortal realm. To be an Emperor, meant Mundus could do this…

**Knights**: A status only reachable by devils. They are their royalty's eyes and ears. There are his advocates and harbingers. He is the judge, they are his sentence. A knight is either at his Emperor's side, or overseeing the multitudes of the Kingdom and enforcing a semblance of law. To become a knight is to throw away you're the identity given to you by your House, and abandon your last name. That devil would then gain a new identity and a new life: To safeguard, and obey unquestioningly the decrees of their Emperor.

Knights are exceptional diplomats, sometimes used to "sway" unruly spawn into following the proper banner. Rigorously versed in arts varying from combat to politics to sorcery, they are also the fiercest loyal circle that has the honor of receiving orders from the Emperor on a regular basis. Knights are on par, or better, than Generals in all ways. There are eighteen knights divided into three castes of six: Pale Knights - are enforcers, jailers, negotiators, and inquisitors. Harbinger Knights - are tasked with torturing malcontents, direct the punishment of the damned, serve as assassins for the Emperor, and are the "holy men" that impose daily satanic worship at the Church of Vice. Dark Knights - are the Emperor's advisors, spies, infiltrators, saboteurs, and primary bodyguards.

**General**: A status only reachable by demons. They are the head of their royalty's army. A General bears the responsibility of training and disciplining any single battalion under their command, a force usually numbering anywhere between a few hundred, to a several thousand. Generals have to be the biggest, strongest, most menacing, most cunning, and most brutal of their kind just to survive the horde numbers of their own command, let along manage them.

There are four divisions of General, each division composed of ten Generals (except for Prime General, which have seven) and they are all called the Castes of End. War General (or Prime Gen.), Death General (or Second Gen.), Plague General (Third Gen.), and Ravage General (Fourth Gen.).

**Mundus**: Longstanding Emperor since the complete destruction of the previous ruler, his knights, Generals, and every spawn loyal to the royal line some odd centuries ago. Only in hushed tones is the grim truth ever spoken: Mundus the Usurper, Mundus the Slayer of Kin. A rarity after the ages spent in Hell, the fallen angels of Heaven have changed much, but not completely in the Slayer's heritage. His physical size grew proportionate with his arcane might, for instance. Retaining a comely appearance, the ugly hole in the Emperor's chest - where a loving heart is forever denied - is proof of his false benevolence, as well as a damning mark passed down to him by his angelic ancestors. Such a curse will be passed down to any of his offspring. With no heart, on the cold light of his soul shines within. Mundus strives to unite the Devil Kingdom into one cohesive force, a fighting force more powerful than all the warring civilian armies combined. He strives to claim the world of humans.

**Sparda**: Dark Knight and War General. He was the first and only one of his kind to gain the highest position of both stations. He excelled in enforcing the ancient traditions - as was the duty of all knights - was creative in difficult matters of diplomacy, and was chiefly responsible for maintaining his Emperor's fearsome reputation for more than a millennia. He was a self-taught master of his own unique sword-fighting style, he attained unchallenged respect from much of the denizens of the Devil Kingdom, and performed unfailingly every command ever given to him by his Emperor.

Believing his place was on the battlefield, the Dark Knight made a bid for the highest power of the martial services: War General. Intrigued, the Emperor had Sparda undergo a series of trials to prove the knight's sincerity. One such trial had Sparda fight every hellspawn who disagreed with his bold career move in the arena of combat. It was a no holds barred fight, and a last spawn standing match. (Guess who won?) Sparda became a legend without really trying.

From this point in history, to the Legendary Dark Knight's retreat to the surface world, is known as the Age Unrelenting.


	7. Slow Burn

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine, but Alastor's a**hole personality is. I made a mistake in "Evil of the Waterways". Dante's eyes are blue, not green. Also, this chapter is **rate R**.

Sarah: Why thank you! 

A huge _something _exploded into the waterways somewhere behind him. Dante was less than halfway into the dead-end corridor when he turned, grim eyes widening at the terrible nature of what he saw. 

"_Run-run-run_!" urged Alastor.

It was Phantom. Magma coursing beneath its diamond-hard exoskeleton instantly evaporated the humidity in the air around it, only to be replaced by jets of steam wherever it tread. Its considerable bulk scraped with alarming disregard against the waterway confines, fracturing stone, diminishing structural integrity. An instant source for arachnophobia, Phantom defied physics by merely existing!

Mandibles swung wide with a thunderous, heat-wave roar.

Dante splurged a split-second rationalizing how something literally weighing tons could maneuver so well under cramped conditions, and then he was running for his life. Torrents of heat flooded the small cul-de-sac with near volcanic intensity. The rising growl of an inferno told him he was scant seconds from a bad burn. Dante slipped through the steel doors Alastor had forced open -

- as Phantom belched a globe of white-hot plasma. 

The space behind him went nova. Stone blocks shattered, then became the consistency of runny syrup. Gallons of water were vapor in the time it took to blink. The massive release of steam and heat caused an equally potent backlash, smashing the steel doors shut with an ear numbing _crash_! Like a vengeful ghost, a breath of devastation pursued the fleeing hunter, gushing out the instant of the portal's closure. It was like being slapped by giant, fiery hand. The force singed/shoved the hunter toward the opposite wall - would've smashed his face in it, too - but a last-minute twist of the body saved him from that much. 

...gonna sting... 

Right shoulder and hip took the brunt despite his efforts to distribute the force of impact. Adrenalin kept Dante's legs from giving out, sparing him the inevitable face-first dunk into waterway runoff, which he was quietly grateful. No telling what irreparable damage that would have done to his machismo. It also helped that everything had happened so fast; the part of his brain that told his body he was hurting was left scratching its head, "Huh?". 

Two seconds later, it must have gotten the newsflash. Dull, hot spikes of pain slowly pushed into his shoulder and hip - a sensory herald for the inevitable bruises - with soreness everywhere else. Momentary puzzlement invaded when the aches did not immediately fade.

...Guiding Light, Dante stewed with growing displeasure. 

Evidently, the cursed key slowed his regenerative powers, if not stopped it completely. Peachy. And there was a low ringing in his ears that he wished would go away. Suddenly, the hunter thought he heard something past the ringing....a familiar cackling. Favoring his injuries, the hunter slowly pushed away from the wall for the false security of a corner, ears pricked at attention. Phantom's overwhelming taint made it extremely difficult to detect other hostile life, and with his hearing temporarily impaired -

- then the spider was gone.

The hell? The hunter had sensed the monster demon's presence as acutely as its brimstone stink.....and then, nothing. "_A change of tactics, mayhap_?" suggested Alastor, its scheming mind piqued. 

How do you figure? came the silent question.

"_Phantom is a General of no small renown. In fact, I believe he assumed his station after the previous General retired...then met an untimely end._" The spirit chuckled in envious admiration. "_Cunning whore-spawn, that Phantom_."

Dante didn't know which to believe: Alastor's logic, or Alastor's honesty. One thing he was certain of, though, he'd have to be selective when listening to his spiteful partner from now on. It didn't seem to matter to Alastor how many times Dante ground its pride in the dirt, a sure sign that the wraith would never learn to behave. He had to give it points for tenacity, but that didn't change how he felt about the sword, especially after it had peeked unbidden into his mind earlier before. Dante glanced at the smoking, half-melted steel doors, and knew the mystery of the disappearing Phantom would have to wait. 

It's a trend, he thought wryly. 

First, Trish does the disappearing act, later Phantom, then the devil knight with the big-ass sword, and now, Phantom again. Dante grunted softly with the effort of getting himself in motion. Ebony and Ivory shared his company once again, and this time, the hunter could clearly sense taint...three of them...floating like haunting ghosts.

Sins.

But which type? The half-devil sucked in a steadying breath. With Ebony and Ivory leading, he pushed on in a brisk jog. He had to hurry. No longer could he perceive the Guiding Light as an inanimate object with a lousy side-effect slapped onto it. The reality of it was far worse, and becoming more apparent the longer it had its claws in him. It was a relentless hunger, utterly mindless and uncaring. It was a never-changing, never-ending starvation no third-world country could hope to match. Worse, it was trying its duly best to sate itself on _his _vitality. 

Sudden dizziness wobbled his hurried pace, and there was this subtle weariness creeping into his joints... The red clad hunter only had to pass by the service tunnel - no time to investigate it - then turn the ensuing corner. He dared to hope there wouldn't be a confrontation, despite the taint hovering in the air. Alas, the trio of Sins appeared simultaneously. Three ivory masks zeroed onto the approaching half-devil with blank expressions and a manic cry. Three giant scythes cocked back in wicked harmony. 

"Oh, you did _not _just try me!" Dante yelled at the obstacles, now running full tilt, and firing into them before finishing his sentence. But that was just fine by the Sins, for they had not waited for Dante to finish, either. 

A powerful lunge sent the hunter into a reckless slide beneath the arc of deadly spinning scythes. Despite the difficult maneuver, two bullets clipped the central sin below its left eye, badly cracking the devil's mask, but not shattering it. Another sin came away maimed from the lead stream. With two in distress, only one able-bodied thrower remained. That Sin Scythe summoned back its whirring arsenal, black-hole eyes following the hunter's slide with nightmare concentration. 

It watched the slide turn into a double-somersault, the somersaults turn into a soaring leap, the leap turn into a highflying snap-kick. The sin hewed in with the full intention of making the hunter into two. 

The boot rushing toward its mask missed horribly -

Elation! the sin felt.

- to hammer against the flat of its scythe, knocking its killing flight at an angle beneath its target -

Icy dismay! 

- and Dante brought his other leg about.... 

The Guiding Light chose that moment to screw with his senses. Without warning, Dante couldn't feel, couldn't hear, couldn't smell or taste; it was like sensory deprivation without the sealed room. There was nothing his body could register, but God, he could _see_. 

The hunter's boot struck home - 

- and the sin's fragile mask collapsed in stages. First, the flawless ivory of its left side cracked like fragile eggshells. The boot ground on, disintegrating one eye, disfiguring the delicate brow, the nose. Ruin's march invaded the mask's right half, grinding fragments into fragments, and completing its destruction in an eruption of white porcelain.

The Light restored his perceptions with an abruptness that made time seem like it skipped ahead without him. One minute, he was airborne, the next, he was running from the dying devil's screams. The destruction of a hellish scythe behind him cleared the befuddling miasma in his head, and it was then he noticed the surviving sins.

Or lack of. 

Doesn't matter, he thought quickly. Just get _out_!

Dante could sense their locations, now; they prowled in the walls, circling like sharks, gliding on ghostly tatters that whispered catastrophe to those that listened....but something was wrong. It was becoming increasingly difficult to focus on the world around him. Like the sand's steady descent in an hourglass, thoughts were half-formed when they began to slip away. 

It was a creeping feeling at first, then of something progressively going wrong inside him. Warning bells were ringing in his skull, alerting him against another assault of the Guiding Light. The hunter found himself locked in an internal struggle.

The lion-embossed door came into view, and he reached for the latch. 

The sands were sluggishly gaining momentum, and Dante could feel himself slowly becoming buried. A landslide of incoherent thinking was taking form, an avalanche that would consume his mind, his very _self_ -

"_Mongrel, no_!" 

- and Dante recoiled as bitter cold stung his hand. Shaking the pain from the limb, he saw that a thin coat of frost had stiffened the leather of his glove, and then he was looking at the source of the deathly chill. Sealing his only exit were a layer of leering faces - tortured and deformed, all - their dead eyes peering out with suffering, and dark yearning. Unbelievable cold radiated an inch above the eerily shifting gray surface. 

A ward of souls!

He realized this about the same time the spirits surged forth in a giant form. The smoky emanation of a gigantic, grasping hand pushed toward the hunter, urged on by the damned who so desperately craved life over limbo.

"_Move_!" barked Alastor in harsh command, but it needn't have bothered.

Dante was already staggering away from a melon-sized fingertip as it swiped the air before his sweating face. In the finger's wake trailed air of such iciness that the half-devil's breath puffed white before he could evade entirely. Crushing the space he'd once stood expended whatever energy the wraith-hand had drawn upon, and, wailing silently, the hand of souls dissolved into wisps of ectoplasm. The otherworldly chill dissipated almost as quickly without its source. 

A short distance away, the red clad hunter let his body slump wearily. Delirium clawed at the walls safeguarding his sanity. He refused to lean against anything for support, however good the momentary comfort might feel, since luxury like that would imply he could afford to indulge his declining condition.

"_Do not fall here, mongrel_," rasped an unsympathetic Alastor."_Do not succumb. Your mind is under siege, this much is obvious, but so is your ability to fight back_!_ Do you wish to die in obscurity_?"

...Your fault...

Dante couldn't see the mordant smile, but he could hear it in the spirit's voice. "_Yes, my fault... Had I warned you of the Light's ill effects blah-blah-blah_,_ well I _didn't. _It was not betrayal, mongrel, for such joys are beyond me, thanks to you. I...helped...in my own way_," it continued with a dragon's grin. "_There is no better incentive than self-preservation, yes_? _Unless the Light takes that away, as I already pointed out..._" 

The Guiding Light hurled a second wave of disorientation, but it wasn't as bad as the first. The sins were becoming agitated. Constantly did they maintain opposite poles around the hunter - before and behind, to his left and his right - leisurely circling only a dozen feet away. With their quarry standing suspiciously still in the narrow corridor, the duo alternately appeared and disappeared to and from opposing walls. When they did not focus on the aura of his life force while immersed in stone, they would catch clear glimpses of the half-devil, and wonder. 

Would a cunning ruse be played out, like it had with their less fortunate leader? 

Still hurting from their injuries, neither had wanted to press their luck. And why did the hunter's aura pulse bright, only to withdraw, slightly dimmer than before? Since the Sin Scythes came from a level of the Underworld almost completely devoid of light - hence their shadowy composition - their vision was keenly adapted to the spectrum the soul always radiated. This energy clearly outlined person, so it was virtually impossible to shake a Sin's notice once captured....but what was this? 

On the hunter's person beat a dark...._hole_, a key-shaped rip of sable _nothingness_. This pulsing artifact, this spot of oblivion, swallowed light with a voracity that sent shivers rippling through the sins' psyches. With their altered sight came a stunning, but pleasant, realization. The light it devoured was not the earthly illumination of mortal sight, but the light of a living aura.

The hunter's aura.

The false-reapers had watched with wary interest, but now, with this twist of circumstance, one sin signaled to the other with a deliberate motion of its scythe. The other caught the sharp movement, and understood.

The silent exchange had occurred in stone, but the spike in aggressive taint didn't escape Dante's notice. Mercifully, the Light's effects were finally ebbing, and it was by his choice that he exaggerated his faltering health. 

"_The Guiding Light smothers you, yet you would tempt fate and lure in your enemies as you are_." It was a statement of fact. "_This is bold bordering foolishness_."

The sins ceased the habitual, casual twirl of their scythes. Dark forms cautiously inched inward in their slow orbit, respectful of the hunter's abilities, but eager to see blood fly. Dante's knees "buckled", and suddenly he was on all fours, which goaded the sins a little closer. What the false-wraiths had failed to notice was slight, a motion too quick for them to follow even if they had been forewarned. 

Neither noted the sudden absence of Ebony and Ivory, nor did they deem significance over the shotgun's new position. The hunter's muddled senses were returning to him in fair doses, and it felt good to have some stability back, but he knew he wouldn't be functioning at one-hundred percent when the time came.

So, to make up for that, he would have to sacrifice something. The diameter between himself and the orbiting sins shrank to only a few feet, and it was then they began to cackle with evil glee. When they abruptly stopped three-feet before and behind him, the scythes came down -

Fuck finesse! 

- and the devil hunter sprang to life with a swift backwards tumble. Converging blades rang loud against solid stone, though it couldn't compare to the deafening roar of the shotgun. In passing beneath the sin attacking from behind, Dante fired up the ethereal cloak. 

High-speed pellets cracked-smashed-_annihilated _the sin's mask, just gone in an eruption of white chips. Though the initial assault had buried its scythe at least five inches into the ground, the suddenness of the deathblow caused the sin to wrench the weapon free. The weapon flew from its master's dying grip in a directionless flight into the corridor's wall, the sound of something shattering almost immediately resounding therein. 

Dante sprang to his feet, adrenalin and controlled-anger correcting the unsteady legs.

Before he could leap away, the lone sin blasted through the disintegrating body of its comrade, heedless that the action fully dispersed the other's form. It bore in keening with berserk fury as the massive scythe whistled down like a giant, biting fang. Dante moved to defend - 

- but the sin's downward slash turned into a vanishing act. Straight down the devil plunged, laughing insanely as it melded into the inundated ground. 

Christ, where...? 

"_Behind_!" 

Taint stained the air.

"Dammit!"

The crafty sin rose up behind the hunter like Death personified, scythe upraised in ghostly hands. Denied the time to about face, Dante raised the shotgun with both hands above his head. A deliberate, last-second back-step saved him from a down-the-middle skewering as scythe-haft collided against gun barrel with bone-shuddering force. 

_Holy freakin' shit_! 

Six - _very long_! - feet of black, razor steel hovered less than an inch in front of his face and body.

If he sneezed, he'd lose his nose, as well as the majority of his face. What's more were the striking details such a close vantage provided: like the clotted, black stains all along the scythe's length, or its gleaming, silvery edge -

- its gleaming, _serrated _edge.

They were like miniature daggers, but finer. They were like the teeth of a saw, but sharper. They could kill with a single pass, but it would be agony before the end, of this, there was no doubt in Dante's mind. 

To kill someone quick, yet to cheat the victim from a painless death, sickened the hunter to the point of physical illness. And then -

- the Guiding Light breached a memory -

Oh, God no!

- Of a night with no sleep, of a white-haired child, recently orphaned, wrestling with logic and counter-logic until he was greeted by the dawn. Ever-wondering with innocence scoured away by trauma: Why his family?

...blood.

His mother had screamed his name.

So much...

Vergil had just screamed. 

There was agony, but he survived.

Unable to understand this personal Armageddon, the boy half-devil had sworn vengeance, had vowed to wear their memory against the ones responsible. The color red....the color of....so much....it was everywhere....

And the three burning eyes would..._not_..._stop_..._laughing_!

The flash of memory tore a ragged scream from deep within Dante's soul. The pain of old wounds burned bright and clear, searing his consciousness with sorrow and so much more. The images all, rekindled by yet another crushing wave of the cursed Light. 

The anguished howl unnerved the sin beyond words. It pulled away with a yelp and heartfelt fright, reflexively trying to recall where it had heard similar wails. 

Reacting, not thinking, the red clad hunter took Alastor's power. 

The Guiding Light's ravaging power was suddenly forced to do battle with an equally destructive energy - the triggered devil knight. The forces were instantly locked in a struggle for dominance, though it amounted to little more than a draw, yet neither would yield to the other. This meant one thing: The knight's regenerative ability negated the Light's wasting side-effects, and vise-versa, leaving both powers "active", but disabled. 

This outcome mattered not at all to the raging half-devil knight, too deep was he in the throes of his past. Alastor appeared in the blazing knight's right hand, the shotgun clenched tight in his left. His outline blurred with the simple act of turning to face the Sin Scythe. 

The false wraith quailed under the knight's withering glare. It didn't - _couldn't _- see the blur that ended its life, but it _did _make sense of the disturbing howl. The raw emotion of Hell's tortured damned were present in the knight's scream, there was no doubt, but there also surged near-boundless fury in that well of misery. It was a righteous ferocity that did not exist in the Underworld, but was more suited to the celestial warriors of Heaven.

The remnants of the Sin's mask - finer than dust - clouded the air from a lightning-quick nine-strike of Alastor's edge, and flat. Now the devil knight made for the ward of souls. Like the trap room of the Beelzebub, the ward dissipated. The hand of the dead reached out one final time, like the reaching palm of a starving beggar, then blew apart with the sound of breaking glass -

- and the devil knight blasted open the door with a well-placed kick. 

The portal's hinges violently snapped - for they were never meant to swing _inward _- and the two hundred-plus pound door was sent flipping twice into the inner chamber. Dante was a blinding shape, all speed and searing bright energy. A distant part of him knew the reason for his being here, but straightforward logic fragmented as a mirror at the sight of demonic Beelzebub. 

The squashed body of a green demon twitched dying beneath the battered weight of the door; it had only seconds of life left, but that was more than enough time to witness the slaughter. 

He was fury.

Five fliers and two green crawlers barely felt Alastor's edge, only to fall dismembered a breath later. Three more airborne demons simply ceased to be, their bodies liquefied from a single, devil-powered shotgun volley.

He was vengeance.

Gripping the empty shotgun by the muzzle, it made a decent offhand weapon. Four more blue beelzebub, and the last green, erupted in ghastly sprays of yellowish-green gore in the whirlwind of blade and gun. 

So quick were the knight's movements, that not a droplet of demon anatomy marred his armor as he tore apart the stragglers. The sole flier smacked wetly against a stairwell balustrade, maggots and internal fluids painting the nearby surface. Panting with exhilaration, the knight spun around in a blur of motion; there was one beelzebub that yet lived.

Piercing eyes of blue-white found the pinned green crawler.

Crackling lines of electricity flicked across the devil knight's heaving frame, as if sympathetic to its master's excitement. He strode slowly - a pitiless judge, a stalking predator - to within a few inches of the beelzebub's alien head. Blood and venom-worms drooled from the demon's broken jaw, dimming crimson eyes barely able to discern the shape towering before it. It would drown in the ankle-high pool if it didn't expire first....

He was _vengeance_.

A feral growl echoed absolute loathing inside the devil knight's visor, and he _leaped_. High up the glowing figure rose - legs tucked in, arms spread wide like ominous wings - a sword and gun in either gauntlet. Silent came the descent - like death's whisper - until the last moment, when _down _he rammed his heels onto the frame pinning the demon. If the sharp crunch of exoskeleton wasn't satisfying enough, then the sight of pressure-squeezed gore splattering like a ghastly corona was more than rewarding. The devil knight stood tall amidst the hated dead -

- when Alastor could no longer maintain the knight's form.

Chasm: Was that over the top? I can never tell! - quote from "Batman Forever" 


	8. Countdown

Disclaimer: DMC and its character's aren't mine, but Alastor's a**hole personality is. Rated **R** for language.

Burryk: Won't it be awkward if I do continue? I started in the middle of the game, after all. Truth to tell, I've BEEN thinking about going all the way with this, but only in the order of my favorite missions - meaning I wouldn't be writing every mission, but the ones I do write will be in order. The very thought of it is intimidating enough to make me hesitate, though.

Author's Note: Dante still has the Guiding Light, and his devil trigger has puttered out.....that's not good.

The aura, the armor, everything vanished, and with it, the stalemate between knight, and key. 

The shock was like flipping on a hundred-watt bulb after a lifetime of darkness, the pain as eye opening as a knife in the back. The muscles in Dante's chest inexplicably constricted, shortening his breath into painful gasps. The shotgun slipped from fingers suddenly moving to clutch the hot ball in his sternum. That hundred-watt bulb flashed behind his eyes again, and with it, came the headache. 

At first, it was a miniscule thing on the periphery of consciousness, but with each beat of his heart, it became more insistent, scrabbling with claws that were at once sharp and as dull as polished obsidian stone. Alastor trembled in its master's white-knuckled grip. 

"_Wanton slaughter aside, mongrel,_"it gritted tersely. "_Quit _dawdling!" 

For once, the hunter agreed; the beastie in his head was having a field day clawing the backs of his eyes and temples. He lurched to his feet - couldn't remember falling to his knees - and concentrated on the arduous chore of moving. 

There, fixed on the wall not ten feet away was a large, six-foot diameter runic disk. Like a double-layered tablet, with a smaller disk stuck in the center of its larger twin - resembling a pupil within the iris - the rough stone bore runic carvings all around the outer rim. At the center of the smaller tablet were a series of slashes cut by zealous hands, creating a rune ten times larger than its brethren. That uneven mark of fanaticism, and those smaller runes of equal dementia, shone bright, bloody red with sacrificial light. Pulsing this light slowly like an unholy, sluggish heart, the carvings bellowed taint at such a degree it was a wonder it didn't disturb the air around it. 

Dante swayed closer, to within sword reach.

Every time he accessed these glowing chicken scratches from Hell, he was thrown into a physical confrontation, or left to grind his wits into solving a puzzle. There didn't seem to be any practical use for them, other than making his day a hairy bitch. 

Simply put: The disks were a delaying mechanism, something to keep him busy while the Underworld steadily worked to overflow its boundaries. Ironically, it was the largest rune - written in the nether tongue - that roughly translated into "strife", but also meant "reward". This, the devil hunter knew from books of demonology, and the few tomes of the Underworld his old man had left behind. 

Guess there was a fine line between pain and pleasure in the daily life of hellspawn.

The disk's "stone" face yielded to Alastor's blows with the consistency of a thick, viscous pudding. Crimson runes flared brilliant white as the hiss of power - like steam under pressure - pierced loudly the air of the staircase tower. Dante felt, more than saw, the unnatural stone-flesh heal, even as Alastor tore free, leaving not a flaw or anything resembling a scar. 

The rune of strife darkened to a malignant red pulse.

Weary of the Guiding Light's mental, and physical assaults, the devil hunter slashed again and again with deliberate strokes. One, two more times, watch the blood-like rune eat up the abuse, then -

- gorged off his efforts, the runes activated for its only earthly purpose.

It blazed with excess power and white Saint Elmo's fire, but Dante ignored the light show for another. Submerged, but visible in the middle of the floor, a three-foot diameter ring of pale light sprang to life. By shear force of will, the half-devil turned a deaf ear to the screams of his past, viciously shoving away the ghosts the Light persisted he confront. Stomping down a fit of the shakes, he squared himself off to complete the last leg of this pointless journey. 

...Busting his hump, reliving a painful past, putting up with everything in general....for a _key_!

Never mind it was killing him, the indignity alone royally pissed him off. Dante wanted to chuck the key off the nearest cliff, maybe plug a few holes in it with Ebony and Ivory before it hit the ocean, but nooo. If it were that simple, he wouldn't be feeling like he'd gotten donkey-kicked by a fucking elephant, now would he? And _that _bit of inescapable logic made him want to tell his better judgment to go screw itself ten times till Tuesday, and _let _him act immature for once. 

The bonfire in his chest was gradually consuming his heart and lungs, working its way down with agonizing slowness, like a form of napalm given voracious life. Stubborn pride battled the pain, inching it to the fringes of his awareness. As of now, his focus was solely on getting from point A, to point B. 

Striding as if the most irritating part of his day were the sad state of his clothes, Dante venomously dared the soul-sucking Light to take a stab at him again. Standing within the shimmering ring, the devil hunter felt the inevitable shudder vibrate the ground beneath his feet. The ashen light flashed as the obelisk - the top of which he stood - powered straight up. Dante grunted and clenched his teeth at the unexpected effort to keep himself upright. 

He knew that the suddenness of the obelisk's ascent was sufficient enough that, if any normal man had tried to remain standing, he would've experienced the unique sensation of both kneecaps popping from their cartilage bindings, and the cushions between his vertebrae compressing. Dante suffered no such disabilities. 

However, if the G-forces were affecting him now, when at first they had not.... 

The obelisk shot passed the lower flight of stairs, blurring their outline enough for memory to jot them down in the subconscious, but making it difficult for the active mind to later summon precise details.

"_Too slow, too slow_..." Alastor muttered with deep worry, though not for its master. 

Yes, it would finally absolve itself of the sharp-spoken half-breed, a thorn in its side forever removed. But in doing so, it had failed to foresee that it was flinging itself into time's fickle care. 

To be forgotten was not acceptable.

At the very least, it would be forced to wait for another would-be owner, or some semblance of one. Alastor's spirit cringed at the mere thought of a witless Nobody "wielding" it in battle. 

...All that wild swinging and graceless hacking....ugh!

With a mental shudder, Alastor dismissed the horrid image and turned its silent, vindictive attention toward the one person threatening its future. Damn that mongrel for dying too soon! How inconsiderate! 

Passed, beyond the platform leading back into the fountain room the obelisk went. More stairs sped by, more gray-green stone walls, and the few lamps bolted within, eerily alighting the way to the top. 

With the clarity of an epiphany, Dante now noticed that his monster headache had gone, as well as the force prying at his memories. Breathing came easy again, the molten ball in his chest had cooled with the slackening of pectoral muscles -

- but in its place, disquieting unease. He felt fine, his mind insisted. Fine, damn it! So why the sudden stab of dread? Even his ire - not an easy thing to soothe at times - had been snuffed out like a torch held to a gale, only to be replaced with this feeling. That worried him. A lot. 

There was a popular saying among humans: ...The calm before the storm. 

The obelisk quaked to a stop fourteen-feet above the desired platform. Acute concern was developing into grave foreboding as the hunter freed his hands of Alastor, and hopped onto the platform below. Without missing a beat, Dante "opened" the mahogany double doors with a shoulder, and all his weight. Antique doors flew wide with the sharp _crack_!of varnished wood. 

Harried eyes briefly scanned the familiar room - four-post bed on far left, a Watcher on its right, dresser to its left, the mirror, and impaled bust of a screaming woman to his right and -

- the sun emblem!

The Guiding Light was already in hand when quick steps brought the red clad hunter before the sun motif. He hesitated. 

"_What are you waiting for, mongrel_?" Alastor pestered. "_Finish this business now_!" 

To the spirit's fevered nagging came a semi-hysterical retort. "Aw gee, and I really wanted to own a life-sucking souvenir from the castle-that-time-forgot....you know, for posterity...?" 

Then, "No shit, you satanic glow stick! But you see a keyhole anywhere?"

It was true. Alastor reached out with powers that were the ocular equivalent to sight, and found no obvious mechanism to insert the Guiding Light. Still, the arrogant spirit was never one to admit defeat, especially if it could lay the blame of failure on another. As pride forbade Alastor from accepting the folly of its actions, so did the spirit totally ignore the waning disposition of its master. 

"_N-no excuses_!" Alastor brimmed with molar-grinding selfishness. "_I have no intention of keeping your corpse company until Mundus-knows-when, you hear_! _I will not suffer for your mistakes, ham-fisted, slow-witted, mongrel half-breed that you are_!" 

Frustration at having salvation so close, yet remain unattainable, had severely taxed Dante's patience. Now, with Alastor's last word, he felt his temper snap like a thin, brittle twig. 

"That's _it_, you egotistical bug-zapper from Hell!" 

His hand found Alastor's hilt, then swung the sword from its place on his back. The spirit never had a chance to breathe its astonishment as its master pivoted towards the balcony doors, and launched the devil arms like a living spear with a parting, "Adios!". The sword punched cleanly through the wood above the door's handle, the sharp screech of metal imbedding in stone some distance below floating up seconds later, and the only indication of Alastor's fate. 

Unable to keep the frame of mind to properly enjoy the deed, Dante returned his heated attention to the sun emblem. 

Bloody hell! There was only so much a half-devil could take! There were things like _peace_, and _quiet_, and _privacy _that the hunter held particularly sacred. And if anybody broached hollowed ground - _repeatedly_ - just two special words: Ebony. Ivory. Alastor had been a special case, and so had received a special form of silencing.

Where-where-where? circled the million-dollar question in Dante's head. He searched with eyes and hands for the elusive keyhole, becoming dismayed with his lack of luck. A greasy cold feeling sent ghost-fingers tickling up and down his spine. The Light followed up with a numbing weariness - like before, but no BSing this time - that robbed much of his manual dexterity.

...blows. This really blows! 

Dante wanted to curse aloud, but saw no use in wasting his breathe. For reasons unnamable, he found himself thinking of the life he led, of the risks, its rewards, and the curve balls that sometimes smacked him in the face. This was one of those instances, but not one he could've seen coming from miles away.

He viewed the Underworld like a hitman, that once it knew the face of its mark, it would never relent until that mark lay dead, or worse. He figured that if it didn't happen in his prime, then the end would find him old and gray, but not without Ebony and Ivory in hand. This was the reality he had chosen to live by, and he had come to accept it long before a certain lightning spirit had tried to rub his nose in it. 

It was sad, and probably made his life's work seem like a pointless endeavor to anyone with an iota of sanity. But depressing of all was not the grim future he had painted for himself, not the solitary lifestyle it entailed, nor the tragic loss that ended his innocence that eventually led him down the road of a devil hunter. No, the most wrenching twist was death - not by devil or demon, or, God forbid, something mundane - but by something much, much worse.

An inanimate object with a hex.

Dante was thumping his forehead against the wall in frustration, his eyes tightly shut against any admissions of resignation. Dante tried, but failed to ignore the weakness in his limbs. He badly wanted to close his eyes, and not think about the consequences. The last of his will was ebbing, taking with it his ability to save himself...why didn't he care about that? He could barely feel the Guiding Light throb with stolen warmth in his hand, and that didn't seem to matter as much, either. 

It would be so easy to just -

- And then came the spark of remembrance, of all the Light had inflicted upon him, of the memories, in particular. A tidal surge of defiant hate that even Alastor would have praised temporarily scoured the lethargy consuming his mind. Like a dagger he gripped the offending key, tight, until the pent-up strength in the coiled muscles of his arm jerked up to stab. 

No keyhole, huh? Dante mentally growled. Then I'll make one.

The Guiding Light came down hard, punching into the bronze forehead of a jolly sun. 

Chasm: Alastor got a free flying lesson! Whee! One more chapter left to end this mission.


	9. Respite: End Mission

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine, but Alastor's a**hole personality is. 

Dark Side Luke: I have several reasons for not novelizing the entire game, too many to mention here. But two of the major reasons are these: 1) My original plan was to write chapters 1-9 and stop. 2) DMC is largely repetitive (fight, explore, fight, explore, find an item, talk to someone, fight, etc.) Because of this, more depth would have to be added by me, and I haven't made plans in advance for that. Trying now would take months at best, kill my urge to write at worst, since I'm too absorbed with ideas for this fic, and any future fics.

Jamal: Glad that you like my "outtakes"! But don't expect my original fantasy to be posted in the near future. I am way WAY behind schedule with that one.

Long, long minutes slipped by unnoticed. 

Alastor could have been declared a monument of all that was wrong with the world right then and there, and the spirit wouldn't have noticed. The devil armsstood dumbfounded were it protruded from a crumbling bulwark, completely, and utterly speechless. 

Below, and no more than scant inches away, yawned a two thousand-foot fall into the choppy sea. In the opposite direction, peeking over a destroyed section of the battlement, teased safer ground in the form of a courtyard of sorts. 

Alastor dully looked about, hardly seeing the patches of crab grass that sprouted between weathered tiles, or even the ancient decorative piece that dominated the yard...or had it been a garden? Alastor gazed with a numb sense of detachment at the sheer drop, again. The thought that only air separated it from a briny fate made it suddenly and decidedly nauseous, or as close as a sword could feel ill.

The battlement also served as a walkway that skirted around the courtyard - boxing it - but eventually guiding a walker above a particular terrace. One of the doors leading onto the terrace bore a splintered hole...Alastor's impromptu exit.

Forgotten. 

Third-person visions of itself began flitting unconsciously before its mind's eye, like slides in a projector. Alastor saw itself become a forlorn artifact in a human museum, left with the dust of ages. In another vision, it lay beneath the sediment of the ocean, its natural tomb. Yet another scenario played out with it witnessing the end of the world, stoically enduring the fire and ice of a planet's death throes. Human cities would crumble, species would die out, all life would cease to be, but Alastor would linger. 

Nothing but a desolate existence, forever alone, with not a single mind to think back, and say, "Ah yes, Alastor, the devil that lived a rewarding life, then fought many a glorious battles as an instrument of destruction and death."

Outside the devil spirit's inner wanderings, the sky was orange tinged with gold in the west, as the dusky hues of the dark side of the world encroached the horizon to the east. There was a healthy, young breeze, whispering urgently along the cloth of banners from a long ago era. Alastor returned to its senses so suddenly it would've suffered whiplash if it had had a neck. The fear of the future unknown abruptly turned black.

Then, there was _anger_. 

Cast aside like so much -

- _How _could this have happened!?

Centuries in the Underworld, and not a single suitable master to call worthy. And now, half the time spent on the surface - a wretched experience in itself - with nothing to show for it but simmering resentment, and the knowledge it had likely squandered the best pairing humanity had had to offer. 

No master was permanent, in the end, but never had the inconceivable crossed Alastor's mind that it might one day be _discarded_. Sword Alastor had always, _always_ been handed down, bought or sold, won or lost, stolen, buried, then found. Any spawn with a fraction of intelligence could easily discern the power it had to offer. 

A dragonish growl boiled like a thunderhead inside the living blade, a reverberating sound that sent visible shivers up and down its metal length. The air around it became thick, charged, reeking of ozone. Electricity crackled, lines of it searing the air, biting it. A behemoth snarl drove spidery fractures into the blocks securing the sword, inching it a little closer to the abyss. 

Alastor didn't care at this point. Let it wallow in the inevitable, it just did...not...care. When the integrity of its perch was truly compromised, and gravity took hold, Alastor bellowed a single curse, as damning as it was defiant.

"_MON-GREL_!"

"WHAT!?"

"_DAMN Y_-..._wha_-!? _Huh_?"

A gloved hand firmly grasped the dragon hilt before its inching slide became a headlong plunge. Metal scraped free from loose stonework, and now it was Dante's turn to spit curses. He was vainly shaking the phantom ringing from his head caused by Alastor's earnest shout. 

"_Thank _you, I've always wanted an excuse to hook you up to my toaster."

Alastor was too astonished to absorb the threat's implications. "_You live_...?" 

Dante drove the devil arms into the ground at his feet, and stood back with a frosty look. "Yeah, I live. Surprised? Well, don't be. Being _afraid _is more up your alley. And just so we're clear: Any excuses, begging, weeping, threats, and/or curses will be summarily laughed at, shot down, then forgotten as I pitch you into the cold, uncaring ocean. Any questions?" 

Again, Alastor failed to react accordingly. "_How did you survive_? _It makes no sense_? _A_-_and you returned to reclaim me_...?" 

A two-second pause. 

Dante folded his arms, unsure how to respond to that. He felt the heat of his anger fizzle out, and was almost sad to feel it go. He had been raring to go and make his thrice-be-damned partner pay for what it had tried to pull. The hunter found himself shaking his head as he began to pace. 

Sure, he had cheated death countless times before, but with each instant, it had come no closer than he had allowed it to. What happened with the Guiding Light...it shouldn't have happened. It was because he relied on another. For reasons of his own, the hunter had sworn never to do that. 

Dante gave Alastor a weighty side-glare, then realized: What's the point? If anyone was going to change, it would be him, and not some spook set in its ways. Stopping in his tracks, Dante pinched the bridge of his nose with one hand, eyes closed, and _willed _any-and-all bitter emotion away. It took more than one try. 

The alchemist sun had turned the ocean into molten gold, as distant, rippling waves glittering platinum diamonds of light. The wind was lukewarm with the nearness of the day's end, and tugged like an eager child at the half-devil's sodden clothes. The crash of the sea against unseen rocks was so faint, it seemed to rise from his own imagination, rather than thousands of feet below him. Dante slowly opened his eyes, and let his arms drop limply to his sides. 

"You know what? I'm bushed, and not in the mood to play twenty accusations. So be a good backrest, and shut up."

He promptly sat against Alastor's flat, and let tense muscles unwind for the first time since arriving on Mallet Island. His energy reserves were on the wear, what with having a sword rammed through his chest, enduring various life or death struggles - most of them a snap, but opposition had been numerous as well as frequent - and, oh, the part with his soul almost being ripped from him had been particularly draining. 

And the magical experience wasn't over yet , kiddies.

Somewhere, the Gates of Hell beckoned a swift, solid kick-and-closure. Phantom seemed determined on another thorough butt-whooping, and the mysterious devil knight....bastard had to be alive. Trish was as elusive as ever, but that was alright. She was a devil, she had to be strong if she had gone rogue against the Underworld. 

And she walloped you good back at HQ cause your mind was in the gutter, Dante silently admonished himself. 'Sides, trusting her fully is not what you want to do just yet. That girl...she's on a mission of her own.

Alastor's intruding hiss derailed Dante's train of thought. "_You...weren't lying were you_? _Sparda_ _truly _is _your sire_." 

"Don't you listen?" the hunter groused. "I told you that soon after we met. And as I recall, I also told you to keep quiet not two seconds ago. God, deaf _and _a short attention span...?" 

"_You should be dead_," Alastor responded sharply, stubborn with denial. "_You practically had one foot in the grave, but here you are_, _impossibly alive._ _You should be a body drained of life, your soul destroyed_. " 

"Sorry to disappoint."

"_Idiot_! _You make it sound so easy. Even while it was in your possession, you obviously couldn't sense the potent dweomer on the key, but I did. Most of my kind would've surrendered, but you..._" 

The lightning spirit sounded frazzled. Dante thought it was making a big deal out of nothing. 

Hands down, the experience was far worse than getting run through. But so what? Given his exceptional parentage, he had come to expect miraculous recoveries whenever work proved more challenging than it had first appeared. 

"...._Do really think surviving a sword through the heart is an accomplishment_?" Alastor ranted on."_Fool mongrel_! _It's as a pinprick to spawn of the higher echelon. Sparda was the same...yet different. He defied the natural order, boggled minds with charisma and calculated shows of power alone...walked away unscathed for ages, despite his conduct_."

His interest piqued, Dante sat a little straighter. "You act as if you knew him," he said quietly. 

The hunter didn't want to imply much, but he knew precious little of his father's personal history, and he found it difficult to swallow back a number of questions. Questions that Alastor might answer, and warp.

"_I...never met him_." Alastor was solemn with truth."_But I saw him once, and that was enough_."

Dante found himself smiling at that. 

Way to go, dad, he thought. 

He leaned back, the glow of affection alighting in his often steely eyes. Now their blue color was softened, the icy chips melted slightly with thoughts of his honorable sire, then his departed family. Evil had struck them down, but Dante saved those images of tragedy for a battle when he might need them. Right now, pleasant reverie was more important. 

It was a rare moment of peace. 

Ah, but there were chores to be done later. He'd have to drudge up the shotgun - he remembered losing it. Alastor was full to bursting with wonderment at his survival, and it didn't take much to sense the spirit's curiosity. Frankly, Dante wasn't sure how it happened, either. 

How amazed he had been when the Light hadn't punctured into the bronze motif, but _melted _into it, instead. As unexpected as that had been, the key vanished just as suddenly in a snapshot flash of light. Left with an empty fist, the knowledge that death had been _way _too narrowly avoided had come charging down the halls of his mind soon after. 

A sense of animation, of feeling - of _life _- instantly poured back into him, then. He had watched in a semi-giddy high as the emblem and its plaque rose up to reveal the hidden door that had been there all along. The next leg of the hunt lay beyond...

But until then, some time to recoup, and woe to any spawn that disturbed him.

Chasm: Good news, I'm motivated to write more! I already have a mission in mind, too. Thank you, reviewers! Couldn't have done it without you! 


	10. Inner Demons

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine. This version of Alastor's and Ifrit's persona are mine. 

A/N: This's a combination of the end of mission 12, and all of mission 13. 

"_I am curious, Alastor_...."

"_Hm, what about, Ifrit_?"

The spirit of the flame gauntlets hissed pensively. "_I confess, that still the reason eludes me how I wound up in the possession of a half-breed_. _I never would've believed it possible if I weren't experiencing it, now._"

Ifrit growled throatily, then, "_I must be the butt of some cosmic joke. To think that my strength would fail me when I needed it most_."

"_Mmm-yes_, _a tragedy_." Alastor could care less. How it wished its demonic cohort would cease its sulky conduct!

Proud Ifrit wouldn't easily forget how its half-breed master had subdued it with so little effort. The spirit couldn't just let it go! Granted, Alastor had endured its own subjugation about as gracefully as a rampaging bull in a china shop, but that was no reason for Ifrit to piss and moan anymore than it already had. It was getting old!

"_But I am not without hope_," Ifrit rumbled on, oblivious of Alastor's lackluster empathy. "_The hunter is only mortal, and mortals are fragile. Ah, but Misfortune must be smiling on me this day, how could I forget his galling skills at combat. Oh, _now _this may become vexing - _"

"Ifrit!" Dante didn't have time for this. "I swear to God, I'll mail you to the Antarctic if you don't drop it, now!" 

"..._Prick..._" Alastor coughed. 

Threatened once before with the tame position of "paperweight", the lightning wraith was still salvaging its pride, bit by bit. How nice it would be if it could fling itself at its master's heart, once more...but with its essence bonded to its master's into service - which was why a scabbard's use was unnecessary - freewill was something of the past. Before anymore insults could be thrown.... 

Griffon's baritone laughter came from on high -

"Aw, fu -"

- but dual thunderclaps drowned out the incomplete curse. Searing bright, there came twin bands of electricity thirty-feet in length. Dante had lost count how many bolts had been launched at him since the fighting began. The angry red streaks flew in horizontally - writhing like jagged snakes - and at a difficult angle to evade. 

One was too low to duck under, one was too high to jump over, and the space between them was too charged to be viable. Thinking only of the consequences if he lingered a moment more, Dante flung himself away -

- a shame he had been atop the mainmast's crow's nest at the time.

It was at least a fifty-foot fall - about seventy, if he had been aiming for the water - but what nagged at the hunter most was not the sudden stop at the end. No, past experience against Griffon assured him motion was his ally. Damned demonic chicken seemed more hell-bent than ever before to fry his ass! 

Nearing the end of the dive, he reached out an arm, snagging the tough cloth of a worn sail neatly bound to its yardarm. The long wooden beam bent a little too much under his weight to be reassuring, but didn't snap. Dante manipulated his forward momentum, swinging himself clear of the sail fast enough to allow another of Griffon's lightning bursts to scream harmlessly overhead. 

Back on mid-deck, Dante glared needles at the monstrosity hovering high above the ship's stern. 

Coiling, dark cumuli leaked off Griffon's body, its exposed core in the proud chest pulsed neon blues and indigos....then flared. Another sideways bolt, a sound like rolling thunder trailing close behind. Dante briefly imagined the wicked clothesline effect if it touched him, then turned and vaulted onto the tall platform where the mainmast stood. 

This tactic placed him above the downward arc of the bolt before Griffon had time to properly intercept. Its second high voltage volley fell short like the first, and Dante winced against the brilliant flashes of both attacks fizzling out against decaying floor planks, and the side of the platform. Being the proud owner of a rebellious streak as long as the world was round, Dante jumped back onto the main deck, made absolutely sure feather-face was watching him, then flicked the demon off.

The hell-bird ground its many beaks in displeasure. What, at first, seemed a simple task, the destruction of this mortal spawn had proved trickier business than it ought to be. 

If the insolent whelp wishes so badly to live, Griffon thought with resentment, then why continue to meddle in the affairs of my master? 

Obviously, the mortal's cranial capacity was too small to fathom the virtues of retreat. As a Death General, Griffon vowed a particularly gruesome end for this upstart manling. It had failed once before, but not again! Powerful muscle action closed the gaping hole cradling its core -

- and Griffon dived.

Dante took in the swelling shape of the plummeting monster with relative calm, Ebony and Ivory roaring fury in his stead. Small sprays of crimson flowered along one side of the feathered chest and neck, but he might as well have been shooting at air, for all the good it did. Dante waited until the absolute last second, self-preservation kicking in when the aerial demon was less then thirty feet away. 

He swapped Ebony and Ivory for Alastor, triggering the spirit's power long enough to glide away as the winged devil knight - back onto the platform. Threads of lightning stabbed down from reaching talons, searing the space he once stood. 

Griffon landed heavily, driving the massive ship alarmingly deep into the choppy canyon waters. For a lasting second and a half, the ghost ship canted weirdly with its stern and middle nearly touching the waterline, the bow and its prow beam piercing skyward into the dense, surrounding fog. Anything that wasn't tied down raced to the lowest end of the vessel. Griffon dug in with talons. Dante held onto a guardrail for dear life. It didn't take a physics professor to know what was going to happen next.

Slowly, then quickly, buoyancy heaved upward with a sickening lurch.

The bow smashed into the sea, white wings of spray fanning out to either side. Again, anything not tied down - especially at Griffon's end - was tossed up and aft, as if launched by catapult. Debris ranged from rope to barrels to cannons, kinetic forces didn't seem to care what it tossed. The galleon's four masts swayed like trees assaulted by gale force winds. Every last bit of rigging quaked with the suddenness of motion, shaking loose years worth of caked filth. 

Deciding he wouldn't appreciate the inevitable whiplash, Dante chose to occupy the safest part of the ship: the air. Jumping fifteen-feet straight up was enough air-time to spare him one seesaw tilt of the ship, but not the return action. He fell. Not a problem.... 

**...**

Around the time he acquired Ifrit, he had finally put the red blood orbs to good use. It wasn't until he proffered them to Alastor - some slight had prompted the offer in jest - did he come to understand their true usefulness. The greedy spirit had eagerly accepted the transaction, and in return, it had imparted powers it had secretly been withholding. As a weapon honed to sunder living flesh, it made sense that Alastor would want a little more blood to stain its name.

Jealous, Ifrit had immediately offered its own advanced services....for a price in blood, of course.

From Alastor, Dante had learned that flight as the triggered knight was a bona fide buzz. Not only that, the power of lightning was literally at his fingertips, he was a raider of the sky, of the air - air raid. Lunging forward with Alastor as the spearhead became another useful trick, what with its quick-strike speed, and long reach - it was quite a stinger. He had also learned that he didn't have to be near a surface to rebound, and attain superior heights....

**...**

Not a problem, Dante thought. 

Long before he touched down, the air verily solidified beneath his feet. Where his heels kicked off, a disk of red, otherworldly light radiated outward like a ripple in a pond, morphing into an image of glowing, archaic calligraphy. Disappearing as suddenly as it flashed, it would've left anyone watching to wonder about the sanitation of their last meal.

Dante had to admit, it was a sensation unique onto itself. Strangely, it always reminded him of hiking in high altitudes, or rather, jumping from them. More aptly put, it was almost like hiking on thin air - an air hike, so to speak. 

Below him, the vessel and all its loose odds and ends settled into discomfited swaying. A moment later, Dante landed flawlessly on the guardrail hemming the platform. 

Rotting timbers groaned long as Griffon shook the kinks from its wings, and readjusted its footing. Ironically, the ghost ship's bizarre integrity kept it from failing altogether. Basically, it would creak like an old...well, _boat_...ready to give under time's weight, yet stubbornly resist structurally compromising damage, even while suffering the stress of a six thousand pound barnyard foul from Hell. 

One vision of Griffon pecking and scratching at the ground was definitely cause for a mental guffaw. In reality, the hunter was more inclined to laugh aloud. He didn't. Not only would that appear unprofessional in the face of battling a major demon, one look into the hell-bird's many eyes assured him he had made the right decision. 

For the third time since the fighting began, Dante wished for the benefit of the grenade launcher -

- amazing how quickly one gets spoiled by the biggest, flashiest toy in the store -

- only then reminding himself how Ifrit had inadvertently destroyed the heavy weapon. Who knew that the spirit's over eagerness for all things destructive would overheat the launcher enough for its ammo to explode? Lucky for him, Dante had triggered into the flame knight, taking the blast without so much as a scratch....though forced to experience a directionless flight into the dirt. Still, he'd gotten the launcher to lob one final, flame-encased explosive present _before _the weapon had literally blown up in his face, ending the first clash between himself and the hellkin giant, Griffon. 

Now, without its aid, Dante readied plan B, a simple bait-and-blast tactic. He swung Alastor lazily from side to side before returning it to his back. Standing atop the railing, he was level with the crouching demon's bestial mug.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. All that zapping, and nothing to show for it," he said glibly. "C'mon! You tellin' me you can't hit me with all those eyes?"

The pairs of eyes crowning each of Griffon's beaks were vestigial, but did well in frightening those of lesser bearing. They blinked blindly with the demon's two functioning main eyes. 

"Your words might sting, if I had a mind to care," Griffon spoke in dual bass rumbles. "You're victory before was a fluke, and I was careless. It confounds me how I ever let you live. Not again!"

One clawed foot stepped forward, and the demon rose to its full, neck-cramp inducing height. 

"So...stand there, and die quickly, human. Resist, and I will deliver you to my master to endure his tortures." 

"Oh yeah? His company that bad? Well, I'm trying really hard to care...." He tapped the side of his head, as if to say his lack of terror was a physical disability. "And you know what else?"

He didn't know why, but Griffon actually waited for him to continue.

"You..._suck_...as a minion of evil. The only reason I'm not running circles around you, is because this ship ain't big enough!"

Demon eyes glittered with inner fires at such impudence. Dante was pacing as he spoke, as laid back as could be. 

"Pretender! Fraud!" Griffon was incensed. The half-devil paused, tension hidden but there. Odorous demon breath - like dog breath, but a hundred times worse - mussed his hair, and snarled his coat. The echoes had not faded before there were more angry words. 

"Pretender! Sparda was not so foolish, why are you? He knew his limits, you think you have none! How can you be his son? You! Lowly human! How could someone like you kill Phantom?"

The last was spoken with a shiver. Dante noticed this, but said nothing.

Every spoken word had been plaguing Griffon's conscience for some time, now. Ever since their first encounter, it had sensed the hunter's potential as a threat, and was surprised to find power ill-suited for combating most hellspawn, never mind the Underworld itself. Despite having to retreat in defeat, Griffon had firmly believed that soon the devil hunter would trip - make a mistake - die a horrid death, with only his human heritage - his flaw - to blame. 

And so the Death General had laughed. 

Then it had heard the reports of Phantom's fall. Griffon managed to confirm these rumors, becoming deeply distraught that such news had reached its ears long after the fact. 

"...Defeated the Phantom...Incredible power..." were the exact words of Mundus's only active spy. The she-devil could be trusted, but still Griffon struggled to come to grips with the truth behind the hunter's origin. 

Faint with dread, it had reported its failure to dispose of the half-human to its Emperor. Crimson lances of light - agony given form - had only been the prelude to the real pain, since Griffon had yet to inform its master of the loss of Phantom. 

The Death General was in denial.

Sparda had been respected and feared. Sparda had been wise, cunning. Sparda had been a leader, and a valued War General. Sparda had been honorable, when a quality like that was near nonexistent in the Underworld. Somehow, he had even kept his honor intact through all the deceit required to defect as a traitor. The Legendary Dark Knight had been Griffon's comrade, an ally.

A friend.

What a fanciful concept, the Death General had once thought. Now, staring down the supposed son of a legend, Griffon refused to believe. The hunter had stopped pacing, now stood casually with his arms crossed, a glint in his icy blue eyes that hinted at vague amusement, and something bordering impatience. The dumb silence in the air was thanks to its outburst, and for some strange reason, Griffon felt embarrassed. 

The ghost ship creaked on. A steady, salty breeze tugged persistently on some loose tarp somewhere onboard. Cloudy waters lapped at the ships hull. Griffon imagined the air had grown dense, heavy with import. Something like the hard, critical stare of its Emperor was in the air. Or perhaps - 

- the quiet judgment of an old friend.

Griffon dared to hope it was mistaken, for it had made a long ago promise it was honor-bound to keep. It set neutral eyes on its mortal opposition. The demon honestly didn't know what to expect, but it had to be something....some tell-tale clue of Sparda's blood - a gesture, a look, a word or phrase, anything. Dante made a face that was the image of languid confidence. 

"Time's a wastin'," he said, tapping his imaginary watch. "Fight, run away, keel over and die, pick, I'm good with either one."

The words were not what Griffon wanted to hear, the gestures not what it wanted to see, and the look it could not bear to watch. Avian features relaxed in a combination of relief and disappointment. 

So, you are not a Sparda, the demon thought flatly. You are too different. Whoever, or whatever you are...you are wasted space.

Without breaking the silence, Griffon snapped with its many beaks, snake-quick.

Dante was wondering when plan B would take effect, however belatedly, which was an unexpected wonder. Feather-face zoned out for a minute there, for what? Made no sense to get its tail feathers in a knot over his parentage. Or was it? 

Dante found that pondering now was detrimental at this stage, and he followed through with his vertical leap. The hell-bird's big head passed beneath him, and by the time Griffon pulled back, it had become a mount. Screeching so loud Dante thought his ears might bleed, the massive demon dipped and bucked crazily. The ghost ship bobbed like an enormous cork. 

Griffon swiped with huge talons, flapped up a storm with vast wings....literally. Even now, the air surrounding demon and hunter grew dark, with swirls of lighter gray. Dante refused to be cowed. He crawled into position, latching onto feathers - sometimes skin as tough as elephant hide - until he was merely struggling to stay in place. Charged particles hummed like ember red bees, drifting in a slow vortex around the combatants.

Griffon stilled enough to eyeball its human rider. 

He looked towering from this angle, straddling the back of its skull, hovering teasingly into view above its right eye. Griffon strained, but couldn't shake the feeling it saw a resemblance. 

Long ago, it had learned honor from an ancient friend...

Dante stared into the bloodshot eye, seeing it not as an orb of sight, but a target. He triggered Ifrit's power, and cocked an aura-shrouded fist -

Long ago, Griffon had promised Sparda to never harm one that was of his blood. 

- and the fist came down. Gauntlet spurs and hellfire flame destroyed the demon General's eye with gruesome ease. Griffon reared in agony. Somehow, it bore the capacity to feel more pain, the searing fists pounding mercilessly against the top and back of its skull. Flesh and feathers were charred indiscriminately. Bone fractured with a sound like a splitting oak. Griffon roared forlornly, and let loose an almighty electrical storm.

Literal _columns _of red lightning knifed down from the dense black fog. While immune to its own attacks, Griffon couldn't properly enjoy the moment when the hunter fell from its neck. Indeed, despite being struck squarely, the flame wreathed devil knight unleashed burning retribution, Ebony and Ivory as his conduits. 

Driven half mad in a whirlwind of indecision, pain, and a battered pride, the rational side of Griffon knew it must retreat in disgrace. Burning, stinging lead rounds bit into its flesh a moment more before the giant's form flashed blindingly. Dante hotfooted it out of there; the place he was standing, and fifteen-feet around that, had become a lightning rod's worst nightmare. 

Like the termini of their first encounter, the monster demon devolved into pure, crackling light. It powered up on brilliant wings, flying up and away. 

Griffon would heal. It would loyally report its failure to its master, and receive any punishment its due. If it survived, it would return for its quarry. The Death General swore it would hold nothing back next time, a single train of thought fortifying its resolve. 

Sparda, and this human, are too different. Their blood cannot possibly be the same, and that means....

Griffon was laughing so hard it couldn't finish the thought. 

Chasm: You wouldn't guess that Dante was in the middle of an important battle by listening to Ifrit and Alastor in the beginning of this chapter. That was the idea. Was I able to get the joke across without any confusion? You tell me.

Also, I thought it was more appropriate that Dante learn techniques directly from his devil arms, and not indirectly through the Watcher of Time. It makes sense, since the moves belong to their respective weapons. What do you think? 


	11. Adrift

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine. This version of Alastor's and Ifrit's persona are mine.

Only after he relinquished his fiery devil form, did Dante begin to appreciate how lucky he had been. The one and only time Griffon had connected with an attack, and his body was still all shaky-pins-and-needles. He had to sit down. 

Sucks to be me, the hunter thought wryly.

How easy it was to forget he wasn't untouchable. Easier still to be reminded of it. Given his exceptional heritage, a swollen ego wasn't unusual. Periodically deflating it was the only way to keep things real, lest he become something....regrettable. 

Ask a person: What do you do with powers beyond the norm? How would you conduct yourself if the knowledge you're more than human were an absolute? 

If there was an answer to that, Dante was convinced it was subjective. He, for one, chose merely to live, and let concepts of superiority and prejudice largely slide under the radar. He tried, anyway.

Hmm...

So...

How had Sparda - a pure devil - learned to cope?

Even the most saintly compassion couldn't have disguised the fact that he was a veritable god among mortals. How had his pity for a species that feared and reviled his race not turned into a bitter beast? How had mercy not decayed into the need to dominate? Yet Sparda protected on, even as he hid his true form from sight for generations. 

Dante could only envy his father's unshakable resolve; _he _wasn't so sure. When the evil of a single human being amounted to a legion of hellspawn, he often wondered if there was another reason for his father's role as humanity's savior... 

Silently, the hunter tallied his devil sire's age before death had stolen him. Over two millennia.

But what about half-devils? 

It never failed to make him wonder, at least a little. In the end, the thought lay unanswered, for there was no real point in knowing when you'll die.

Around him and the ship, low, dreary clouds rolled by, an unremitting march of gray. A pale, pasty white light shone from within the murk, as warm as moonshine, and without a source

Dante stood, finally, testing his sea legs after Griffon's shock therapy, and found that he had more or less recovered. He carefully scanned around, out of habit. 

At key points on deck, there were large, iron baskets stuffed with wood too old and too saturated to catch even if aided by blowtorch. With typical disregard to the laws of probability, these three-legged stands were the only things untouched by the fight, even magically rekindling with cheery blue fire. It was a sign the ghost ship felt safe.

Dante smirked at that. The dilapidated galleon would never win a game of chess, obviously, but it _was _self-aware....somehow.

The fog clung to everything like a greedy specter. Bright though the watch fires were, thick gloom covetously hid everything beyond its sultry cloak. There was the occasional vague _something _that peeked through, but they were little more than shadows, and suspect of ever being there. 

Dante assumed his ride was still on the narrow channel, flanked by soaring sandstone cliffs, capped by different castle wings and towers. That was his hope, anyway. Otherwise, he didn't know _where _the hell he was. 

"_Hunter, onward_!" Ifrit advised with gusto. "_If I must serve, then it is best done on the field of battle. With lots of opposition. Yes, I wish to scorch something to cinders. Something living, preferably._"

"..._A glutton for carnage if ever there was one_," Alastor scoffed.

Ifrit belted out a string of gargling growls that was its way of expressing amusement. Dante rolled his eyes skyward, as if to ask "Why me?". 

"It's times like these that I wonder why I keep you two around," he sighed, more to himself than to the spirit duo. "And then I remember, "Oh yeah! You're both evil incarnate, and can't be trusted in anyone else's hands." Silly me..."

Running a hand through his hair, he discovered that some silver-white strands were standing on end with lingering static. He made for the captain's cabin while smoothing down the trouble spots. 

When he got there, the twin ghost swords that once barred his way were now positioned on either side of the cabin's doorframe. White fire licked across the broadswords' outline, but gave no indication they would activate again, as they had with Griffon's appearance. 

Dante opened the door, and stepped inside.

**...**

The smell was like a slap to the face.

It was a combination of lingering death, and something like stagnating seawater. Moldering wood lent to the already putrid odor, as well as various other spoiled matter around the room.

Like the captain's corpse. 

Alastor gave a noncommittal _zap_! of electricity.

Dante wrinkled his nose from the stench, and lifted the cloth of his turtleneck up to his face.

Ifrit's disturbing enthusiasm bubbled up like molten rock. "_Hunter, those old bones over there....may I burn them_?_ Say yes_!"

"You're all about that, I've noticed." 

"_Our friend Ifrit _- _the unbalanced fellow that he is _- _is about as subtle as a brushfire_," Alastor remarked. 

"_I was famous for immolating countless souls in one fell inferno_!" Ifrit puffed with pride.

"Uh-huh..."

As Dante moved further into the room, Ifrit began spouting lines of horrific pastimes involving hellfire.

Overhead, and more into the middle of the room, hung an antiquated, brass chandelier, swaying in sympathy with the ocean's mood. The tarnished metal gleamed dully from the light of its many lit candles. Their weak glow wavered against shadows that grew, and shrank, according to their rocking. Portholes with misted, scummy glass did not help the muted ambiance.

There were actually other things to inspect, but Dante saw nothing was as...odd, as the corpse on its throne. There was something about it, he couldn't place it right away. 

Death didn't faze the hunter. Quite the opposite, it interested him to an extent. He wasn't a necrophile - God no, nothing so sick! - his interests only going so far as any good forensics investigator would permit. Studying this sensitive subject was easy, thanks to smart programs on the tube, books, mostly the internet. 

Eventually, heavy research had pulled him past the land of necropsy and medical science, into the religious, and supernatural. Life after death, the eternal soul, the existence of God and Satan, Heaven and Hell. Hell certainly existed. Nothing solid about the rest, though. 

"_Mon-grel_," Alastor whined in distress. "_Ifrit will not be silent_! _I no longer wish to know how to properly smother a damned soul in brimstone_!"

"Can I ask you something?" Dante was not conversational.

"_I_...._what_?"

"What's wrong with this picture?" He waved his free hand toward the dead captain. 

"_You mean, aside from the obvious, like a still-rotting corpse on a still-rotting pirate ship from the eighteenth century_?" 

"Natch'."

Alastor reached out with powers that mimicked sight, and immediately saw the problem. Ignoring the frayed satin rug beneath the long, formal dinner table. Looking past the once-valuable dining cloth, the seemingly random bits of tableware and liquor bottles. A cursory glance at the finely dressed body slumped in its tattered, wingback throne. Never mind the hands-turned-claws gripping the armrests, or the dark, impossibly scrutinizing eye sockets. 

Alastor focused on the eerie deaths grin, plastered firmly where lips had shriveled to dust.

"_The dead do not smile_...._not like that_." 

"Mm-hm, glad we're on the same page, for once."

"_I don't understand. I've seen my share of humans _- _living and dead _- _and none look as...forbidding, as this one_."

"Well, this bad boy was a nasty customer in life. It's possible those vibes carried over in death."

"_And from where does this wellspring of insight come from, O Knowledgeable One_?"

Dante released his turtleneck - the smell was bearable, now - and glanced up at the decor hanging like an ominous halo over the captain's chair. Oversized human skulls - looking to be _real _bone - leered evilly from their places on either side of a massive, darkly burnished ships wheel.

"Eh, call it a guess."

"_Rrrr_-_Hunter_!" Ifrit was growing irritable without the distraction of violence or something burning. "_If there isn't a purpose for us being here, then let us take our leave_."

Dante began searching the cabin, instead. For what? For _anything_, Preferably a clue what to do next. He didn't like to admit to himself, that since arriving on Mallet Island, he'd done little more than stumble from one encounter after another. With only brief spats of easily done, straightforward puzzle solving, he was relying too heavily on where luck took him for his own liking. It was even worse to consider that he was being led around by an invisible leash, a manipulation he could neither avoid nor fully detect and counter. 

The red clad hunter wasn't used to being this aimless, and that bothered him. Besides, he figured there had to be something important in Captain Dead's cabin, or else what was that whole protect-the-ferry-of-souls business all about?

In hindsight, the reason could be something as stupid as treasure.....Dante blinked.

There, against the far left wall, was a collapsed crate - correction, a chest - with its contents spilled sinfully in view. The red clad hunter moved from one side of the dimly lit room, to the objects of his attention. Bending down on one knee to better inspect his find, he realized what he knew all along.

Gold coins. Lots of them.

And gems! Their original luster was marred by a layer of grime, but there could be no mistake of their value. All the classic trappings of a pirate's bounty was spread out before him, with nothing to stop him but the limits of his pockets! Now, Dante was not a greedy man, but _damn_! only a fool would pass this up willingly. He reached down to take the weight of a fortune in one hand -

- when a little voice in the back of his mind - called Discretion, not Alastor or Ifrit - reminded him of where he was. 

Dante stood as he turned away from temptation. Captain Dead seemed to regard him with amusement reserved for thieving children, daring him to take the gold. 

As a rule of thumb for one in the hunting biz, it was important to see things as they are, not as they appear to be. It was part of his profession to distrust the superficial, so why was he letting his imagination breathe false life into a corpse, when he knew Dead was dead? 

Because the creepy son of a bitch _is _looking at me. Dead, but not dead. Somehow...maybe... 

The hunter growled sharply, uncertainties of certainties gnawing at him when he knew they shouldn't be. He didn't even sense taint, damn it! Anthropomorphizing was a pain in the ass, Dante decided finally. Compounding this Twilight Zone moment, he couldn't be sure if the loot was trapped or not....and the captain's constant, patronizing grinning was hardly reassuring! Oh, but if the gold was free for the taking... He cast a fleeting glance at the forbidden wealth.

Never in a hundred years will this come my way again, Dante groaned inwardly.

He turned away with painful finality. 

Alastor tsk-tsked condescendingly. 

Apparently, the spirit had wanted him to give in, if only to remind him of his weakness later on. Ifrit was out of it, as usual, busily arguing with no one which would burn best: the living, or the dead?

Sifting about the room one last time revealed nothing relevant.

There were water-damaged maps adorning half the wall space. A few small paintings hung destroyed by moisture and mold. A pair of bookshelves flanked the cabin's entrance, them and their contents poised to crumble under their own weight. To compliment their once-elegant look, an olden style globe of the ancient world sat nearby. Age and elements had turned the antique into a piece of junk. 

A modest stone fireside sat in the shadows near the back of the room. Atop its mantle kneeled a familiar lion-headed statue, the Watcher of Time. Dominating space on the opposite side of the cabin, was another statue, this of a Greek pantheon carved in realistic detail from the waist up, and situated atop a white-turned-gray marble base. The statue held something close.

Half-devil eyes narrowed, discerning a flaw in the pantheon's design. 

With a sparing glower at Captain Dead, Dante strode over to the peculiar artwork. Like every Greek god, this one conveyed serenity with knowledge that mortals would balk at. It was sublime with the secrets of the cosmos, staring out with alabaster eyes that at once saw nothing, yet everything.

The marble figure just screamed "perfection!", which sparked disgust in Dante that was as justified as it was unavoidable. 

Perfect face, perfect physique, perfect bearing, even the wreath of laurel leaves atop its crown of short curly hair: perfect. 

It was wrong. All wrong. 

It was just like the paintings within the castle walls, and the sculptures, and the suits of armor, the castle's architecture itself. Once upon a time, they might have belonged to the human world, but no longer. Hell itself had corrupted every molecule. Though perfect, this statue was a caricature, a false prize of human history. This statue, this ghost ship, this whole _island_ had no right to exist. 

Slender marble arms gathered an object close to the smooth marble chest, a thing that wasn't as seamless as its bearer. It was a caduceus, by the look of it. 

Almost two feet in length, silver plated with flecks of rust, a pair of flared, feathered wings at one end, and the twining bodies of twin serpents dominating the rest, it was the same image slapped onto many a ambulance. 

Definitely a caduceus. 

But it was held awkwardly... Dante tested his theory, and rapped the suspect item with his knuckles.

A genuine flaw amidst illusionary perfection became clear: The staff shook loosely in the statue's grip. And he'd seen this staff before, didn't he? Out of curiosity borne from growing certainty, Dante read the solitary name stamped onto the marble base.

It read, "Hermes".

The hunter grinned like a kid. No way! As in, the "Staff of Hermes"? 

"_Mongrel_!" Alastor exclaimed, realizing the same thing a beat later. "_Outside the cathedral, beyond the shattered bridge, wasn't there a likeness of that thing_? _Near the engraving of the Pride of Lion riddle_?"

"Absolutely."

"_Then what are you waiting for, hunter_?" Ifrit gurgled impatience. "_Take it, and let's be off_!"

Before Dante could protest, the possessed gauntlets guided his hand, and snatched the Staff of Hermes in one fluid swipe.

________

At one end of the Staff was welded a hair-thin wire. 

The wire, remarkably untouched by time or the elements, snaked down the lower levels of the ancient galleon. Just above the bilge - the bottommost interior of the ship - a lone pair of barrels sat forgotten. The metal line was attached to a clever flint and steel mechanism, which, incidentally, lay deep inside both barrels. With the sudden pull of the wire, the mechanism produced a small spray of yellow sparks -

- igniting the black powder within. 


	12. Gauntlets and Blades, Round 1

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine. This version of Alastor's and Ifrit's persona are mine. **Rated R** for some language, and graphic violence.

A/N: I bear no animosity toward people living up north, or those that choose to join Polar Bear clubs and/or similar groups. 

To avoid confusion: Remember how Dante just stood there while the ghost ship sank? Stoo-pid! I've given him a reason to stay put now. In this version, I envisioned that Dante had jumped straight onto the main deck in the beginning of the mission. Why? Because the man CAN leap great distances, and if it wasn't for that "invisible wall" blocking the player, I'm convinced Dante could've made the jump onto the ship in the game. 

In other words, he hasn't fought the Blades below deck, and he hasn't discovered the needlegun...

****

Dante knew he was in serious trouble when the ghost ship gave a colossal shudder. When the ocean began gushing in all at once, he knew he was meat. 

"_Look at what you did_!" Alastor cried shrilly to Ifrit. "_If the mongrel goes, we go with him_!"

"_Gah_! _Must you squeal like a castrated pig_? _We have the staff_!_ We are in no dan _-

- _by the Dark Lord's teat, this place floods_! _Move, hunter, if you value your hide_!" 

Yes, it would've been nice to do just that, too bad the turbulent waters conspired against him. It was as if water cannons had been built into the walls - two of them, actually - specifically aimed at him, then cranked to maximum jet. It impeded him, but didn't stop him from bulling his way to the door. 

Turned out to be a no-no, since he only managed to cross halfway before a wall of H2O - where in Hell did that come from!? - drove him into the stationary dinner table...how convenient, it was bolted down. Unable to escape the pin, Dante just ground his teeth and dug in his heels. 

Jesus H. Christ! The water was _freezing_! 

He hated the cold! With a passion! A single bad experience during a job in snowy Colorado had ruined him for life. It was there he learned the true, and profound meaning of "thin ice". 

Returning from his trip down memory lane, the hunter flinched as salt water pulled at his thighs, then hips. 

The powerful undertow swept up random bits of debris, knocked one bookshelf flat, and polluted the water with half-decayed clumps of wood and paper. The antique globe was bowled over, then jammed up against a corner. Hearth and Watcher were swallowed by a singular rush of water as the ship dipped subtly to one side. Hermes was too overbalanced, and busted his perfect face in the fall. 

The twisting currents were fickle, ebbing one moment, surging the next. Aiming to live a long, fruitful life, Dante gradually pushed off the table's lip, to wade through the icy water, and the hell out of here! 

Cripes! How do people up north take this!? he wondered incredulously, thinking of all the crazy fucks that joined Polar Bear clubs and the like. 

The current heaved forward, returning an unwilling Dante into the table, again. Because Alastor and Force Edge guarded his back, Dante was spared the feeling of the table mashing into his kidneys. Snarling wordlessly at the waves, he twisted around for better leverage for another go. Before the chilly waters could entomb Captain Dead forever, the hunter blinked dubiously at the dead man -

- had the grin curled further up the skeletal face?

The captain's toothy smile seemed to bid him a manic farewell, then disappeared beneath the tide. By this time, Dante was shivering, but not entirely from the cold. He still couldn't sense taint from the corpse, yet it smiled at him, _right at him_! What the f- !

Trapped air from below burst up, giving birth to Old Faithful's miniature twin. The ensuing "rain" proved that violently liberated air and water could drench, as well as sting. 

Hel-lo mini-Niagara.

But that wasn't the worst of it, oh no. With water up to his shoulders, Dante caught a glimpse of the chandelier as its chain decided to snap. It fell as the last of its candles died, leaving the hunter in darkness, and the suspended image of the chandelier in his mind's eye. 

**... **

By the time his eyes adjusted to the dark, Dante was treading water inside a shallow air pocket. As Lady Luck would have it - the bitch! - his air supply was quickly dwindling into soap bubble proportions. Teeth chattering, he looped the Staff of Hermes one-handed to his belt while trying to float in place.

"...hate the cold, hate it!" his shaky voice echoed dull and hollow in the shrinking bubble. "Gonna vacation in the Keys because I _deserve _time out from this shit!"

With that, he sucked in precious O2 as his reservoir of air ceased to be. Instantly, the grip of great depth pressed in on his body. His ears popped a heartbeat later.

Funny, it was brighter underwater than above. Whatever light that eked its way in was refracted and enhanced, somehow. Of course, Dante wasn't working with full-blown daylight here, just the minimum illumination to see by - like the wan light of predawn. 

He tried the front door, but found no success. It was jammed.

No time to bust it open with fists or steel, Ebony and Ivory would misfire underwater, the shotgun was equally useless, and his air pocket was gone, so no turning back. The hunter tried the portholes, but they might as well have been cemented shut.

Deliberately ignoring Captain Dead, he pushed toward a paned window in the back. Pressure had done its work here as well; the glass felt impossibly solid....and what a fascinating view of the water's surface from this vantage... The half-devil cast another look around, creeping worry stiffening the hairs at the nap of his neck.

Drowning wasn't going to become a reality anytime soon because he knew his body's limits, and knew its warning cues. If he couldn't find a way out, then he'd have no choice but to create an exit, and he didn't know how much energy - _time_, more importantly - that would take. The ghost ship refused to fall apart with Griffon onboard, what were the chances of a single, man-sized half-devil breaking through with fists and sword? Dante was psyching himself for that eventuality when - 

- There! 

Beside the staircase descending into the cabin, was a ventilation duct at floor level. Dante homed in quickly, suddenly eager to make certain his eyes weren't deceiving him. 

The vent's grating had been torn off when the ocean had barged in. A thin stream of bubbles slid free from its dark interior. Dark though it was, Dante could see faint light at the end, about twelve feet in. The shaft wasn't impossibly small, but would be a claustrophobic experience for someone with his frame. 

Without a second thought, he doffed both swords from his back, and pushed them through the duct. 

"_You aren't leaving me are you_?" Alastor blurted. "_I-I've been civil all this time...a feat in itself, I might add_." 

Dante ignored the spirit, and followed after. 

Arms out before him, he swam/slithered down the straight shaft with little difficulty, pausing long enough to drag his weapons ahead of him. His shoulders grazed the shaft's sides the entire way, and the fear of getting caught up on something pressed teasingly against his mind. Emerging was like a breath of fresh air - figuratively speaking - but it was also bad news.

Lovely, he thought. Below deck is exactly where I _don't _want to be. 

Indeed, too many detours usually meant tedious backtracking. This moderately large, rectangular room was where the ship's thick mainmast extended down through the middle of the ship to the keel below. Useless cannons, and other odd heavy equipment littered the area. Weak illumination stabbed silvery gray beams through small firing windows on either side of the room, while an odd number of unidentifiable scraps traveled slow-mo in the still environment. It was surreal. 

Dante saw grim reality in the shapes that swam into view. 

Undulating their sleek bodies made them seem almost harmless in their grace. But these reptiles were thick-scaled, and powerfully built, armed with talons on hands and feet, both sporting a whip-like tail. They wore bone-white helms that masked their fanged, sloping faces, and a buckler of the same underworld metal on one lean forelimb.

They were Blades. Two of them, and they noticed him as well.

Ifrit, forget the Antarctic, Dante reiterated to the fire spirit. The Antarctic is too good for you. I'll stick you in my fridge, instead. It's not as cold, but at least I can point and laugh at you whenever I want.

"_Because I do not know what this _"_fridge_"_ is, I've decided to ignore you._" 

The gauntlets gave a petulant, "burp" of fire. Water vaporized, spitting up a thick cloud of bubbles from either gauntlet. Dante saw this; an idea was taking shape. 

No sooner did he replace Alastor and Force Edge at his back, did one Blade rush straight for him.

The other held back, waiting, watching.

The charging Blade was a wiry, black-scaled beast, sporting four-inch long talons as wicked as they were long. It feinted toward his left flank, only to return to the right, raking wildly and without finesse. 

While a sword or gun would be unwieldy underwater, Ifrit packed enough punch to make up for both. For all the Blade's show, Dante knocked the slashing limbs aside with one strong slap, then presented the demon with a spectacular backhand across its reptilian face. Metal gave, teeth broke, and the lizard twisted almost a perfect pirouette. It tried to orient itself, but a fist in the gut changed its mind.

"_Yes, finish it_!" Ifrit crowed. "_I take it back. Allow me_!" 

The Blade recovered fully, only to witness a gauntleted fist clamped down on its helm's visor, crushing the metal mask like aluminum. Stunned, the Blade had no time to ponder its supposed superiority in the water. It never even had time to scream. 

Ifrit cheerfully unloaded white-hot hell into the demon' s headgear. 

Claws thrashed once in violent reaction before the body gave in to convulsions. Flakes of blackened scales, skin, and vapor bubbles spread a gruesome death shroud over the twitching carcass. There was no blood; that caramelized on bone instantaneously.

Savoring the killing, Ifrit waited a few seconds more before relinquishing its fire, but not its hold. The flame spirit laughed - genuine belly-rolling laughter - as if there was no tomorrow. When the pressure in Dante's hand had gone, and control was his again, less than polite thoughts zipped a million miles per hour in his brain, many of them revolving around the fact that Ifrit should be constrained by his will, just as Alastor. Between private curses, Dante finally settled for -

- Would you stop that, _please_! 

"_Agreed_," said Alastor in turn. "_Why should you be so fortunate when I am more deserving, Ifrit_?"

With an abruptness only accomplished by the terminally insane, Ifrit went from untamed hysterics, to brooding silence. For a crazy second, Dante thought the fire spirit had simply...left, but no, he could hear it muttering profanities in demon tongue.

We'll talk later, the hunter thought gruffly, his attention switching to see what the remaining Blade was up to.

It still made no move, studying with obvious tension the hunter, and his grisly prize. 

In the few distracted seconds that followed its comrade's end, it hadn't done anything but stare? An offhand flick of the wrist tossed the dead Blade to one side. The true horror of Ifrit's overkill became plain when brittle vertebra crumbled, and the Blade's head drifted askew of the body. 

As if on cue, the remaining demon - a dark green specimen - scooped something up off the floor, then slid into deeper shadow behind the mainmast's trunk. Suspicious of its scrutinizing from the start, Dante was downright biased, now. 

Were _any _of Mundus's goons slick enough to fashion a decent trap?

Gracing the Hall of Outstanding Failures: the biplane room with the assorted marionettes, the fighting pit underneath that, the Sin Scissor portrait, the Death Scissor ambush, oh it just went on and on. They were all unavoidable, all as plain as day. 

The red clad hunter found that he was slowly becoming offended by the utter shoddiness put into every little "set-up". 

Determined to end this farce before it could escalate into something irksome - like the dramatic entrance of reinforcements - Dante edged forward, all business, and ready to kick ass. He could see the Blade circling out of sight, peek once, then hide again. 

He had been holding his breath for almost three minutes, now. He was still in the green - his lungs still comfortable with the air still in them - but the closer he approached his quarry, the more he didn't feel secure with taking his time. Dante drifted up to the mainmast, stopping himself with his palms. There, he lingered until the Blade filled his sixth sense, its taint forming an impression of its position. 

The demon twitched to his left. 

The hunter pounced, expecting and ready to counter dozens of scenarios - 

- none of them involved a gun in his face. 

Alastor and Ifrit got their signals crossed with a belated warning. They must've been picking their disembodied noses for all the sputtering they did. Dante let them know -

Curly, Moe...find Larry, you're just not the same without him. 

- then promptly told them to shut the hell up. 

For a tense few seconds, hunter and demon didn't move. 

Since the gun was in close proximity - mere centimeters away - Dante had no trouble identifying it. He didn't recognize the make, but there could be no mistake: a needlegun. He'd seen scuba divers use them on sharks, and had once handled one himself, so he knew its basic mechanics. 

Heavy, but maneuverable in the water. Built like a gatling gun. Six barreled, duel-grips for stability against recoil. Quick reload time. Pressurized gas was its power source. A little over a hundred darts in the ammunition box, and able to fire five-inch, steel-tipped shafts at a rate of six rounds per second almost simultaneously. 

Okay....so now what?

Without warning or provocation, the Blade clomped the needlegun against his forehead. Hard. When the hunter responded with a hostile look, he received another conk on the head. Both times, the gun was aimed at him immediately after he was struck. The Blade was quick, too quick to fight back with the needlegun less than an inch away. Worse, it seemed to be enjoying itself immensely, like a child tormenting a chained dog.

Luminous red eyes wrinkled with amusement in the dark of its helmet, and it wasn't hard to imagine its crocodile grin. Again, it struck, right between the eyes. One more time, right on the kisser.

Dante was seeing double, he tasted blood, and he was on the verge of doing something reckless. 

Damn lizard was playing with fire!

Even if pride had allowed him the use of Alastor's power, the spirit had no juice to give, having spent what little it had on Griffon. Ifrit's power was similarly out of commission until it recharged. Then the hunter saw something that made him want to kick himself and laugh aloud at the same time. The corner of his mouth quirked up in one of his trademark smirks.

Suddenly confused and upset, the Blade pressed the needlegun under his chin in dire threat. 

The demon had failed itself in two major ways: One, its claws were too big to squeeze the trigger...that is, if it even knew what the trigger was designed for. And two, it hadn't noticed Dante noticing. 

The demon must have realized the potential use of the needlegun, had known that its adversary would recognize the human weapon, and act with caution, if not fear. In its moment of brilliance, it had nonetheless forgotten to learn how to use the gun. That lack of crucial insight was about to cost the Blade dearly. 

Dante knew this was going to be short and sweet.

When his smirk became a derisive grin, the heels of his palms rammed up into the demon's extended arms. The sound of popping elbow joints traveled beautifully underwater. With a muted howl, the Blade felt an icy stab of fear as the needlegun fell from its nerveless grasp. It was vulnerable, now! Even with both arms useless, the demon was an agile swimmer. It veered away like an eel -

- not fast enough.

Caught by one clawed foot, the Blade was viciously yanked back down. Its half-devil nemesis hooked vengeful fingers onto one scaled shoulder -

"_Hunter, may I_...?"

MINE, Ifrit! 

- then nabbed the needlegun with his free hand before it touched the ground. Gun clenched in one fist, Dante proceeded to beat the living snot out of the loathsome hellspawn. 

The helmet caved after four chops from the heavy gun. Three headfirst thrusts into the mainmast loosened the chin straps, as well as rattle loose teeth. A backhand to the jaw soon reversed momentum and became a solid punch. One jab to the solar plexus draped the helm awkwardly over the lizard's face, setting it up for a knee between the eyes, which detached the dented headgear, and exposing the battered countenance underneath.

Satisfied he vented all his anger - it wasn't healthy to keep it bottled in, after all - Dante felt no remorse as he leveled the needlegun. Broken, bleeding, and half blind, the demon Blade heard the faint _click _of a pulled trigger, then knew no more. 

Chasm: College is slowing me up a bit. The last chapter of this mission will be up in due time. Patience will be required, but it'll be well worth it.


	13. Gauntlets and Blades, Round 2

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters aren't mine. This version of Alastor's and Ifrit's persona are mine. **Rated R**.

A/N: My apologies for the slowness, but I REFUSE to post up rushed or half assed work. I owe it to myself and my readers to make that effort. Because this chapter grew too large, I've decided to cut it in half, so that the NEXT chapter will be the official last chapter of this mission.

Mip the Demon Fox: It's not Ifrit's I.Q. you should be worrying about, but his sanity!

****

A little something called "persistence" can go a long way. God knows, it helped in almost every hunt that mattered, and was a positively vital practice in other cases. Yeah, persistence allowed him to conquer many a difficult trial, in daily life, and on the job.

Unfortunately, it worked both ways, as it was turning out.

The Blade swiped diagonally at his neck and chest with one claw, the other swinging low to disembowel. Dante felt the tug of cloth - not flesh - rip from his shoulder as he twisted his body around and away. Between the slashing limbs the Blade's chest was defenseless, so the hunter made sure both his heels connected hard enough to force air from demon lungs. Tumbling end over end, the next thing the demon knew was the needlegun unloading rounds into its torso and left arm. Dark blood clouded the water like squid ink.

Injured, but alive, the Blade slid toward the back of the room.

Not thirty-seconds ago, the previous area had been warded against escape. With the spawn sustaining it dead, the seal had broken, allowing entry into the next room - a larder, or cargo hold, or something. Dante hadn't been overly surprised to find another reptilian pair waiting for him.

In fact, the only shocker - and it had been pleasant - came in the form of a jagged, roughly five-foot diameter gap in the ship's hull. Escape was so close! From it the hunter could see water-carved stone - the bottom of a wide slope leading up and beyond his line of sight. 

At what point the ghost ship had hit rock bottom, why there hadn't been an increase in water pressure while sinking, and why the landing hadn't set off a single vibration or disturbance, was yet another anomaly attributed to Hell's slow emergence. Physics simply did not want to comply with Mundus so near! It was as if the reality of the mortal realm was warping in steps, molding in nonsensical ways to accommodate a world even more alien than its nascent stages. 

One enigma at a time, please, the hunter thought to himself.

Never a fan of the headache-inducing mechanics of metaphysics or ontology, Dante willing gave up figuring out the mysteries of "should-have-been's". Personally, he favored the simplistic logic of "kill or be killed".

With that thought in mind, the red clad hunter turned to meet his next attacker.

Seeing its comrade limp off in a trail of its life's blood had mixed caution to its murder-lust. It juked from right to left, striking quickly like a snake. Other times it tried to distract with its tail, only to come around with a lash of sickle hind claws. 

Opting to take the fight outside, Dante deliberately gave ground, trying his damnedest to fend the Blade off while making subtle his retreat. If the hope of dry land somewhere above proved empty, then at least he would have the benefit of choosing his battleground away from the ship's confines. Besides, he wasn't desperate for air, and wouldn't be for some time, still. The hunter descended from the mostly gone second floor, down below the breach, where collapsed beams, planks, and decaying crates lay. 

The goddamn Blade was relentless!

Claws scraped almost continuously against his gauntlets, Ifrit having a ball inside his head, howling something about "fire" and "skull trophies", usually followed by maniacal tittering.

"_Ware the other_." Alastor seemed to whisper in his ear. "_That one is wounded, but still able. It's on the move, toward your flank. It will strike soon_."

Dante understood he was about to be cut off, but couldn't do anything about it. He could feel the leaden weight of taint behind and to his left. It was slowly revving up for some serious violence. Alastor was right, it would fall on him soon. 

Tireless, the frenzied Blade plunged into another series of slashes and cuts; raking down with both fore-claws, then both hind-claws. Blocked each time - as it expected - the demon pushed off the hunter's defenses, its supple spine arching backward in a tight flip. In whipped its tail, catching its prey unaware, or so it thought. The red clad half-devil jerked his head back from the attack that would've taken one of his eyes. Quicker than a blink, he clapped both hands on the trailing tail. The Blade reacted lightning fast, its reflexes boosted by rage and imminent peril. 

A mere dozen feet from escape, the hunter elected right then to make a daring comeback. 

As the Blade coiled around to rip out his throat, its aim was spoiled when two gauntleted fist appeared before its face. Blistering, stinging heat exploded from Ifrit, forcing the Blade to cry out and retract its talons as it jolted back in pain.

That's when the second Blade pounced.

Dante met it hand-to-hand with fire and spurs. 

A short distance away, the first demon lizard recovered well enough to open its half-singed eyes, and witness the life-or-death struggle of hunter and prey. With vengeance running hot in its veins, the Blade screamed piercingly in outrage, heedless of the air it was giving up to do so. It speared into the fray. Or tried to.

Before it even reached him, Dante loosed gouts of heat through Ifrit, vapor bubbles rising thick and concealing, as well as searing into his second demonic adversary. The veil of white air quickly grew large, obscuring the tussling combatants almost completely. 

Swooping back a short ways from the obvious trap, the first demon leveled both arms at the cloud, hissing as it focused blood into each clawed digit. The pressure built until flesh ripped, and eight talons shot through water like air into the concealing screen. New talons sprouted from its destroyed fingertips, and it repeated the process. Again. And again! 

Demon eyes flared red with its wide, savage grin.

Crimson mixed with white, thickening with the thrashing of unseen limbs and red coat tails. No doubt its fellow Blade had become a casualty of war, but what did it matter? It was exquisite how another's pain could so please the Blade. Better still, it had fulfilled its Emperor's wish, and there would surely be a reward for this...!

Demon eyes narrowed. Something was wrong.

Death throes became the stillness of the dead. The shadow of a body floated into view as the bubbles cloaking it danced to the ceiling, thinning into shreds of weaving air. The Blade's aim had been true, it could see. Claws had torn numerous, ghastly wounds into the body, laying open muscle and sinew as surely as a surgeon's knife. 

Its comrade had died almost instantly, to be sure.

The body began to dissolve as shock turned into cold fear. The Blade turned around, its senses screaming in warning -

- and looked into the eyes of the hunter.

Gauntleted fists drove deep into the demon's muscled midriff, cruel spurs digging deep. Letting out an involuntary gasp, the lizard accidentally sucked water into its lungs as it folded into itself. It didn't drown right then and there for one, simple reason: strong fingers had curled around its windpipe. Weak from a truckload of misgivings, the Blade could do nothing but spasm as its lungs struggled to expel ocean water. 

What turned out to be a temporary salvation, became the harshest irony imaginable.

Dante glared deadly hate into the helm's eye-slits. Worse, it was hate tinged with a mischievous glint. Abruptly, the hunter swung the helpless Blade around his shoulders once, the orbit gaining speed near its terminus. Anyone watching would assume he was about to launch the reptilian javelin and be done with it. Anyone that knew Dante personally, would've averted their eyes long ago. 

Dante released the Blade long enough for its tail to fly within reach. Snagging it, he yanked back - _hard _- smiling grimly at the sharp _pop_-_pop_-_pop_! of dislocating vertebra. The demon only had time to wonder what the hell was going to happen next, when its backwards flight terminated, out of the blue, with a fist to the groin.

Something other than bone crunched beneath the spiked knuckles.

Ifrit groaned in sympathy. Alastor was quiet. Apparently, spirits could faint. 

Effectively losing all sense of dignity, the Blade curled into a tight fetal position, then promptly forgot the world around it. Dante thought this pitiful ball of demon kind might implode if it sank any deeper into itself. He let the demon go, watching it sink gently to the deck below. Thoroughly convinced that Blades bore gender after all, the hunter pointed the needlegun in what would become an act of mercy.

On second thought....

**...**

Remarkably alert, despite its grievances, the Blade watched the red clad hunter as he turned to leave. The needlegun was discarded for some reason. 

No! The demon refused to be left this way!

For all its pains, it would not leave the half-breed alive. Doing so meant humiliation it couldn't bear. Even the lowest ranking spawn would have good reason to ridicule it, even attempt to kill it if they were of a mind to. Despite the toothy ache between its legs, the Blade threw itself at the hunter's back.

All Dante had to do was lift Alastor from his back a little, and let the stupid beast impale itself. 

Chasm: Next chapter will be up soon! Thanks all for everything.


	14. Of Maddened Dead: End Mission

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. This version of Alastor's and Ifrit's persona, Bheruken, Spitferes, Frost Tempust, and Glarai are mine. **Rated R**.

Mip the Demon Fox: Ifrit has issues, alright.

Parker Allen: Ifrit can really turn up the heat. I figure if there's such things as underwater torches and flares, then why can't Ifrit burn with fifty times that intensity?

Everyone has their secrets.

I have mine, you have yours. The whole of the Three Worlds are laden with things they do not wish to come to light; is it, dare I say, an unwritten law? The Underworld, the Mortal Realm, Heaven, they are more alike than you can possibly imagine. Rarely, however, do the prevalent mysteries reveal themselves, much less without a price. Oh, you already knew that? Liar. Pandora unleashed chaos and suffering because she _had _to know the secrets of - 

- Did I mention I'm an utter loon? I should know, I've been out of my mind for well over five thousand years. Don't look so surprised, it tries what little self-control I have.

I am Ifrit, mad am I, and we are inseparable. But enough about me, for now, I said I had secrets, didn't I? Well, I'll tell you one...would you like that? _You bet your soul to the inferno_,_ it will_! 

Why, you ask? 

Why not? Can't a demon of venerable wisdom....yes, wisdom....impart his knowledge without suffering under suspicion of nursing an ulterior motive? I've indulged whims far more heinous than this, I'll have you know! Besides, I am in a good mood, and you do not look particularly flamma.... 

Where was I? Right. 

The hunter would wish to know this secret I'm about to tell you, even though he hasn't said so, yet. My secret is -

- Wait.... _Finally_, we've surfaced! 

The hunter tries to discern his new environment from the pool's deepest end. He does not struggle to stay afloat, despite the dragging weight of his arsenal and myself _I_'_m not fat_! _Or a traitor_! Never a traitor! How _dare _they accuse me! Are you one of them? Those hungry for power, those underhanded - !

- I despise the cold.... 

My aversion of temperatures below the boiling point of iron is legendary. So naturally, I was the only Ravage General who did not bolster his ranks with Frost Tempust, Frosts, Glarai, and Auromancers. Why should I, when I could rely on hordes of Homromsi, Pyromancers, Spitferes, and Bheruken? 

The Spicere. I used them, too. Often.

How those floating orbs of self-destructing death always sent a flutter of joy in my heart when they exploded in the midst of the opposition. Random limbs would soar like nightmare confetti, the flames....oh, I could tell you _stories_! 

Of course, the blasts would tear into my own troops with frightening regularity...which caused discontent...and eventual mutiny. It was during a fiasco in the Serrated Pit region when it happened, mutiny, I mean. I dealt with them - the defectors - alone, as was my responsibility to do as a General. It was tiring business, let me tell you! After the first few hundred thousand fell, it was easy to parley with the survivors to submit. They readily surrendered, and I enjoyed burning them alive. But I digress.

We surfaced from the bowels of the human vessel and onto a rocky shore. We are in a hole in the earth, shaped into an underground cavern of porous bedrock. The air is sour from the sea, disgustingly humid, and deathly still. The floor seemed to have frozen mid-boil. It waved and bulged, sank into knee-deep pits filled with water or simply air. Still, it was traversable. 

The walls were carved by erosion, old and rough. Where large patches of scum crept from sneering fractures, the pocked stone varied in shades of ochre. How well would they burn, do you think? What, no comment? Good thing for you; I had the excruciating desire to destroy something in the time it would've taken you to answer, and I'm afraid your voice would've lent me a target. Worry no more, the whim has past. 

Have you guessed my secret, yet? No? I should think it's obvious, by now. Still nothing? Why am I suddenly filled with the image of me dancing on your blackened bones? Oh! H-how awkward, I must apologize for that. I do not dance. 

The ceiling is irregular. Spiked with stalactites steeped in darkness, they would appear as the fangs of a starless night to any mortal's sight. _My _sight, however, pierces the black easily, whilst the man-who-would-be-slayer-of-my-kin squints hard at the gloom. Understandable, he is only half devil. 

His vision is superior to those of normal men, tis true. Why, the most recent proof of this was our jaunt through the ghost ship; the level of lighting inside had been virtually nonexistent.

Behind us, the aforementioned galleon lay battered against the enormous trunk of a dull-peaked stalagmite. One mainmast had buckled near its base, snapped so thoroughly it no longer stood proud on the main deck, but in the water overboard. The wood of its hull is badly scuffed, reaching into splintered planks until the ruptures become evident. Most of the damage lay hidden underwater. I know instantly it is truly a dead ship, now.

With the Underworld slowly seeping into the mortal realm, this reality ceases to make sense. Like the hunter, I do not recall the ship crashing to a halt. It's funny, and it makes you think. If neither of us could remember the galleon grinding ashore, then it never really happened, did it? And yet, the evidence it _did _happen is right here and plain to see. It boggles the mind, if you let it, but not I. Can't surprise the maddened dead, I say.

In silence, the half-spawn turns away from the wooden corpse, and leans into a slow walk. 

One, two steps...five steps, six...stop.

I sense the taint, as well.

His gaze pins the site he dismissed earlier with a glance. Perhaps twenty odd feet ahead, is the mouth of a roughhewn corridor with an arched entry. A reoccurring theme, this medieval bit of architecture hides from view the owners of the conspicuous taint.

At this distance, the guttering of torches is almost supernaturally loud, their light like a wavering beacon. The licking of flames is a lovely sound. Better, if mingled with the scent of charred things, or the bleats of the dying, oh yes. The ghost dance of their flickering light is alluring, mmm seductive.... They cast fluttery, silken shadows against the ground and walls, enticing caresses, ohh so sinful. They -

- Ah yes! My secret! Almost slipped my mind.

Did I leave you in suspense for too long? Did you suffer? No? A pity. You still want to know, don't you? Yes, of course... Did you say something? I care not. My secret is this, I -

"Ifrit."

"_Hunter_," I mimicked his casual tone. It didn't appear the half-breed wanted to dispose of my unseen brethren just yet. No, he wanted something. An answer. 

"What you did back there, on the ship, it was....unexpected," he began evenly, friendly like. "So I start thinking to myself, "Dante, Alastor can't cut _prices _without my say-so, and here's Ifrit, sadistic, pyro-maniacal wild card Ifrit, uses this brand spankin' new ability he's supposedly incapable of using....on me." Now, I'm sure if I wasn't so damn curious, you'd be spelunking the length and width of this cave _underwater_. So, take advantage of this rare moment, and shed some light on this little mystery, hmmm."

It was not a request, and spoken with barely hidden false geniality. Tch, _well_, there's only one way a self-respecting demon like myself could respond to that.

"_I don't wanna_."

"Don't get cute. Humor a half-devil, or else."

I wrestled with myself whether to grant his wish or not. It was an entertaining distraction for, oh, a glimmer of a second. Amazing what madness will do to a mind, yes? Besides, I had already made my decision. 

"_Very well_," growled I with a sigh because I can."_Tis a simple trick, really. I merely seized the Blade's visor, then summoned up the arcane fires latent in my soul, and _-"

"_Not_...what I wanted to hear, actually. But you knew that already. Tell me, is it absolutely necessary to try and tick me off every five minutes? Your kind have a quota to fill, or something?"

"_Sarcasm. It suits you. Have I ever told you that_? _Is this all about the Staff of Hermes, then_?_ All I did was reach out and fetch _-"

"Whoa-whoa-_whoa_, I just had a thought," the hunter broke in, counting his fingers as he went. "You're born damned, you spew jargon that sounds as sincere as a greasy car salesman, and you deliberately dodge my questions. ...My God, you're no demon, you're a politician!" 

"_There it is again. Sarcasm_! _Hah_! _Should I take that as a compliment_?_ I think I might._" 

I admit, I didn't quite understand the punch line, but I am again reminded of the slayer's saber-edged tongue. He can summon up acid to coat a remark as surely as an assassin dips his blade in poison. Poison reserved for me and mine. Rrrr-what impudence! Such scathing disrespect! 

When I decide to grow a conscience, I must make a point to feel cross.

The hunter scratches his brow as a lopsided smile spreads across is face. He finds this situation humorous, strangely enough; hardly the image of intolerance that I was sure to become his angry mask. I possessed him, took away his freewill, if only for a moment...and his reaction is a smile? 

Hm, just goes to show there are more layers to his character I've yet to unearth. Fascinating.... When next the son of Sparda spoke, his mien was pleasant, but marred with an ominous undertone. 

"Y'know what?" he said, a shrewd light in his eyes. "I'm not going to play your game of verbal tag. This calls for a quick fix, like a compromise."

"_Do I have a choice_?" 

"Not really. Deal: If you never use that possession trick on me again, for _any _reason, I won't resort to prying answers out of you with my almighty powers of persuasion."

"_Pfeh_! "_Almighty_" _my ethereal a_- "

"Ifrit...!"

"_What_? _At any rate_, _you assume too much. My word is not necessarily my bond, hence, the promises I make are generally short lived._"

"So's my goodwill."

"_A threat_? _Can't punish the dead_,_ hunter. Especially if I don't give a damn_." 

I saw the hunter's expression cool several degrees, and his smile froze as he said to me, "I think you've known me long enough to understand that won't keep you safe from me."

"_Which part_? _That I_'_m dead_, _or don_'_t give a damn_?"

"Both. So, deal?"

I was laughing before I understood why. I felt no true humor, only irony. Irony, because I knew a secret he did not! My secret! Mine. It's a secret I've decided to tell you first. Feel _special_, curse you! 

"_Who am I to cross swords with the son of the legendary Sparda_. _Very well_, _I concede_."

"Glad that's settled, then," came his gruff response, a slight accent on "settled". He never truly expected to get answers from me, you know, and he knew that arguing now would reap him nothing but more nonsense. He wasn't giving in to my chaotic tenacity, oh no, his thoughts are clear to me.

He sought answers from me with the straightforward approach, and failed. Next time, he will have to come at me from different angle, like a wolf analyzing a rival for weaknesses. Until that moment arrives, he'll just have to keep an eye on me, for all the good it'll do him.

Finished with me for the time being, the half-spawn rolls his shoulders and cracks the tension from his neck. His unnatural blue gaze fixes on the taint-ridden archway. Ebony and Ivory - twin reapers of mine ilk - materialize as twirling shapes in his hands. 

"If there's one thing I hate about my job, it's hellspawn with nil manners. Can you believe they haven't invited me to the party yet?"

"_What party_?" 

"The one I'm about to start." 

We cover the distance quickly with long, determined strides, directly toward the archway. 

He thinks his cunning can undo me. It might as well be a dare, a dare to goad me into possessing him again. Though I am sorely tempted, I will not. Do not confuse my decision as an act of submissive fear. Do so, and I shall take great pleasure in tearing your soul apart! 

It's risky, angering the likes of Ifrit. Riskier than you or he really know. Now! Now, I will tell you! Things that will make you shudder, cringe, and pray I never lay angry eyes on you! My secret...is this.

Alastor, my brethren of Hell, my compatriot of hate, you are bound to your _master_ because your soul was weak, your age and power, too insignificant. You, who have seen a mere century and a half of life, then "lived" for centuries more as a fiendish blade, you are now without freewill. A slave.

While I....I am not.

Does that upset you Alastor annoy you make you feel superbly hostile toward me? Ahahaha....Exquisite. You lash out at me, curse me for my good fortune that really isn't based on any luck at all. I -

- Rargh! Marionettes! Coming into full view as we pass beneath the archway!

Their kind are the most brainless creatures ever to clutter the pits of Hell, don't you agree? Well...with the possible exception of the Agonofinis. 

And the Terreofinis. 

And the Mortofinis. And the -

- But that's beside the point!

There! A jester in mottled indigo, garish ruffles and all. It is crumpled against the right hand wall, lifeless, but very much alive.

And there! Left! In a deep alcove with a wall torch, and a small horde of human wealth!

A bloody mari dangles from phantom strings, inert as driftwood. My "master" draws near. Closer, closer, _yes_! He raises Ebony and Ivory - black and white death - never slowing his step, never considering the freakish life he is about to take. 

We are less than eight feet away when vague strings loosen. The bloody mari clatters to the ground on slack joints, only to lurch upright with menacing life. Ember red eyes glitter beneath its ridiculous wide-brimmed hat as foot-long, saw-toothed daggers simply appeared in each poorly carved hand. The indigo jester lurches up and forward a moment later, unsheathing dual scimitars from seemingly air. I snarl savagely with unbridled excitement because I know _I know _they're both too late! 

Without pause, Ebony spits a string of lead fire into the mari's face, pointblank. I shudder in restrained ecstasy at the roar of gunfire and the mari's scream of pain! 

"Don't you dare..." I barely hear the hunter's quiet, grim warning; he senses my animal hunger for carnage, and he prepares himself to fight me for control. He needn't worry, though, I'm not crazy....hehe...crazy enough to battle him now. Why? Because I do not wish to ruin this glorious moment of _murder death kill_! 

The puppet is blown back, deep into the alcove it once hung suspended. It smashes into a chest of coins, bursting the rotted planks instantaneously. Before the mari's body even settled, Ivory is in the face of the of the other, the jester. 

BANG! Bangbangbangbangbang! _Gone _is the puppet's face in a mist of red. 

As it destroys itself flying into the wall - the wimp - the hunter senses more opposition the same time another pair of devil dolls make an appearance. There, not far, hobbling down stone steps leading up, another bloody mari and a lesser jester in green. 

We move in for the kill. You -

- Alastor, are you not enjoying this? Do not snap at me, child prince! Yes, "child"! You may have matured in undeath, but that changes nothing! What? What did you say? Why not do away with the mongrel if I'm so powerful, you ask? As I've already said, fear does not bind me. 

No, I do not shrink from this man of Hell and Earth, not in the slightest. What the ruins of my sanity _do _allow me to feel, is great respect. None - except for the backstabbers of my past - have ever bested my strength...and he did, fair and square. Perhaps my spirit has grown a might listless over millennia, and that is why I failed to conquer his will, but the jokes on him! Strong enough was he to defeat my strength, but not subdue it! 

What's that? It doesn't make sense? Of course it does, young one. A beast of the wilds may be captured, but that does not make it tamed. Take that analogy to heart, for I am a beast unlike any other! 

The hunter has about as much control over me as he does over the wind.

Then why act the petty servant, you ask _quit asking_! Who do you think I am? An oracle? Yeesh! Didn't your clan mother teach you how curiosity killed the Shadow? Or was that the Savage Golem?

Argh! Now look what you've made me do! I was so distracted I hadn't noticed the hunter finish the two marionettes on the stairs! Their bodies - or rather, their body parts - fade into nothingness, twitching in false life. How in Hell the half-breed dismembered the poor devils with only Ebony and Ivory is a sight I would've enjoyed watching, damn it - !

- Now where was I? Ah, yes. 

This "mongrel" as you call him, is steadily plunging himself into the depths of the Underworld, preparing himself through trials of blood and battle, to face Mundus alone.... Now, I ask _you_, why would I want to stop this from happening, or leave before it does?If I did not find this eventuality intriguing enough, then the inevitable clash of powers will be more than a treat. And if I am to help the hunter plow his way to Mundus's doorstep, and he - by some miracle of a chance - defeats the Emperor, then I would know _know _that he is worthy of my strength.If Dante can somehow do all this and survive, then....I don't think I'll mind "serving" him indefinitely.

As long as there's killing to be done, things to burn, the hunting business should be fun.

**...**

Ifrit.

I had that demon pegged as a complete basket case from the start, but now.... I look at the company I'm forced to keep - a _really _good look - and I wonder to myself, "Alastor, what, in all the Circles of Hell, have you done to deserve this?" 

In essence, I've a ravening fire starter to my left, and a cynical spawn hunter to my right. This must be what the damned feel like. I believe Ifrit, word for word. He is insane beyond understanding, but at the same time, he's retained a frightening intelligence that has remained invisible, until now. 

I am afraid.

I never told him - or the mongrel - my true age. I never said anything remotely hinting about my status in life. A prince. Ifrit called me a prince. How could he have known? And he tells me he _respects _the mongrel? Impossible, when I know - I _feel _- for certain that the demon would feel no qualms about killing the half-breed. Whatever warped code of honor that demon abides by, I want no part of it. But I don't have a choice, do I?

The mongrel turns away from the death site of my kin, and ventures back to the alcove. I sense the taint of the mari lying in wait, a foolish, stupid move. Would've made more sense to just lay down and die. Aware of the devil as I am, my master silently trades Ebony and Ivory for my own lethal edge. He does not slow, acting the part of unsuspecting prey.

And, of course, the mari falls for the rues. That's one thing I'll agree with Ifrit: Marionettes are complete idiots.

The instant the mongrel comes into view, the devil puppet flings its daggers with supernatural speed. No sooner did it let fly its blades, I was there to deflect them - our proximity was _that _close.

_Kling_-_kling_! Overhead goes one dagger, passed the shoulder went the other. 

Ugh! Ghastly! The mari's face...it...it is everywhere but where it should be! Ebony had chewed away the right half of its face - splattering it liberally across the walls behind it - and hadn't stopped until only one, red glowing eye remained. Bright crimson oozed from the massive wound, and somehow, even without a mouth or jaws, the mari screamed in rage. And then it did the unexpected.

It collapsed, and died.

The mongrel jumps back from the mess that was once a perfectly stupid devil, his aura of professionalism falling way with a surprised yelp. The doll's body faded in moments, taking with it its daggers, but leaving an extraordinarily bloody decor on walls and floor. Ifrit pushes me aside to gloat to my master about the benefits of bathing in the blood of his enemies. I stay out of the conversation, if one could call it that. I do not wish to attract the demon's attention, not now. 

I need to think.

And I succeed. Unfortunately, nothing comes of it. I can't impose my will on either the half-breed or Ifrit. I can't escape in any way. I am bound to my master until his death or his volition, and I'm steadily sinking into a pit of despair. Yippee. Tch, careful Alastor, you might actually _get _somewhere if this keeps up.

My uplifting train of thought is interrupted with Ifrit's gurgling laughter. My master ignores him. Whatever words were traded between them just now, I've no interest in finding out, especially when Ifrit's involved. With my attention and thoughts thoroughly distracted, I content myself with observing my master's antics. I hear him whistle to himself as he leans over spilt coins of gold. I see many are practically swimming in splashes of red left by the dead mari, but many more are not. Prime pickings. 

"Hot damn, somebody loves me...!" Master crouches near the cleanest pile of coins. I watch idly as he shovels a number of golden disks in one hand before pocketing them away inside his coat. He repeats the process several times, stopping when his actions bordered on greed. At least he has that much sense. I'd hate to see him die because his combat effectiveness was destroyed by surplus loot. 

His death would leave me alone with Ifrit....brrr!

My master straightens, quite satisfied with his plunder by the look of him, and throws a triumphant grin at the ghost ship. It wasn't until much later that I discovered the meaning of his grin, which is odd, I think. It had something to do with....a dead captain, and his gold? 

His stride is jaunty as he climbs the stairs, a path that will likely drop us into another encounter of the hellspawn kind.

Chasm: Time to give my muse a break, I think. Feel free to drop suggestions (your fav missions, maybe?).

If you haven't read my bio: I'm an extremely slow writer, or can be, but I _do _plan on finishing this fic. 

In the words of a certain flame spirit, "Feel _special_, curse you!" ^_^


	15. Intermission: The Meaning of Names

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine.

The Watchers: Whether vigilant or simply curious, they are the Grigori, or "the Watchers." Numbering two hundred, these were the Sons of God, angels, under divine direction to watch over mankind. Within them was knowledge only meant for the celestial. But some of the Sons saw the daughters of men, and began to lust for them. Yet, at the same time they were compassionate in their urge to guide and teach humans - who were meant to learn through life's trials. Whatever their motive, the Watchers took unto themselves mortal wives, and imparted their knowledge to the rest of man (astrology, arts, letters, war, etc.) 

God became aware of the Watchers' transgressions, and punished those that had gone against His Word, casting them into a spiritual prison - called the "Abyss" - until the day of judgment.

One Watcher escaped this sentence. Though granted reprieve from a terrible fate, the alternative was not much better, but by his choice, a preferable one. Forever this Grigori would watch over the destiny of mankind, never to directly interfere again. And he must remain useful in his torment: Where ever Hell's taint threatened, he must manifest - no matter how many times over - acting as a sign of impurity to frighten away the innocent, make the hearts of hellkin quake, and to attract the priests and hunters to destroy any wicked spawn. A symbol of defiance and tragedy, forever weighed by time.

The Watcher of Time.

****

Fallen Angels: Those that chose to mate with human women, the fallen Watchers. Those that chose to side with Lucifer, whose angelic name is no longer, and is better known as Satan. Mundus is a fallen angel, one several generations removed from the power his ancestors once wielded, though no less a formidable being. 

There is an unknown number of the Fallen residing in Hell. An estimate is even more difficult to presume because the dark angels - many of them turning on each other years, or even seconds after banishment - are no longer in their original bodies (see **Death**). The War in Heaven, the cataclysmic battle of the celestials, is said to have cast over a million angels into Fallen exile. Some of their names are: Beliar, Abaddon, Leviathan, Murmur, Anzu, and Astaroth.

****

Birth: Capable of mating with their own kind, spawn very rarely succeed in producing offspring. Sometimes - either in frustration, the cruel joy of the act, or mere procreation - they venture onto the surface world and mate with humans of the opposite sex, usually amounting to rape with an unwilling partner. Always the chances of yielding mongrel offspring are higher in these cases, something largely dependent on the fertility of the human victim. Sparda was the only devil in Hell's memory to have cared for his soulmate(s). (It's very possible he had other wives, he _did _live for over a millennia). But even these successes couldn't possibly account for the near countless wicked dwelling in Hell. How is this so? Because Hell itself acts as spawnkind's breeding bank. 

As disgusting as it sounds, those hellkin who do not have biological parents, are instead born within an enormously vast cavern of pulsating walls of flesh, the color of the flesh varying from a healthy spectrum, to the infected, bruised, and diseased. Sickening of all are the abscesses dotting the length and width of the chamber walls. Ranging in size of up to five to thirty feet in diameter, each pustule contains an unborn spawn - the literal spawns of Hell - waiting to burst forth and be born. 

Because of the almost total lack of natural birth, there are no such notions as "mother" and "father", as well as a slew of other related words, like "family." Instead, there are "clan mothers", "patriarchs", and "Houses". The word "clan" is the closest imitation to "family", but still not viewed as anything worth holding dear. (Exactly how are devils and demons "born" into their respective houses is for another time to tell.) 

****

Death: When angels die, they return to God. When humans die, they are designated a place in the afterlife. When hellspawn/fallen angels die, their darkened souls have one of five paths chosen for them by an unknown force. (Ordered from worst to best)

1) Oblivion: The soul experiences the essence of nothingness. In this space of non-awareness, the soul is forever lost and considered destroyed.

2) Reincarnation:The soul is reincarnated into a newly born body. The body is determined, it is said, by the same force or will that dictates the destiny of every denizen's soul since the creation of Hell (believers of this force have firmly labeled it "The Epoch.") From time to time past-life memories carry over. This usually means the reborn spawn have a clear picture of where it stands in life _now_, and where they stood in life _then_. This can either be a blessing or a curse. 

Example: A Blade reincarnated into the body of a Beelzebub, definitely ten steps down. A Blade reincarnated into the body of a Frost, a definite improvement. Now take this a step further. Even less frequently occurring than the resurfacing of old memories is the curious ability in which they improve an inferior body, granted if the former body was sufficiently powerful before death. It's almost as if the power of the deceased body - or perhaps the ambition of the soul? - is transferred, greatly enhancing the newborn. (Could Sparda have been one of these? It's a thought.) 

3) Sentient Weapon: The soul is given a vessel to inhabit. Traditionally, the vessel is a house's preferred weapon (the equivalent of a coat-of-arms). This is done through precise, often exhaustive ritual exercises - everything from acquiring materials to make the soul weapon, to months straight of self-alienation. Never is a ritual accomplished by force - without the spawn's freewill, the process simply does not work. In the end, the soul is essentially guided into its permanent residence. Sentient weapons cannot be destroyed by any earthly means.

But what's so special about this form of voluntary imprisonment? Fear of Oblivion, fear of a demeaning reincarnation, fear of losing all memories through reincarnation, the power to control the soul's destiny after death, defiance against The Epoch (and sometimes a spawn's reason for wanting to control the fate of a soul). Others, especially ruling patriarchs, do it for prestige, raising the status of their house without ever relinquishing control of the clan. This is very risky, and only done if the patriarch is absolutely certain his position isn't threatened. Sentient weapons are great tools of power, symbolizing the potency of a house.

Anyone with the resources can create a soul weapon. 

4) Possession: The soul wanders for a time in a daze after the death of its body. But when a soul wanders for too long, the shock of death wanes, and it begins to act on its own. They feverishly seek the perfect body to take before The Epoch finds them. A spirit will never vie for control against someone obviously stronger than they, instead choosing only challenges they can conquer and - hopefully - that will benefit them most over their previous body. 

When possession occurs, the soul of the victim must battle with the invader for supremacy. Temporary insanity ensues. The victim loses, and its soul is violently expelled, destroyed by trauma. The body suffers, as well. The soul is life, with it torn away, the body dies, but remains animate through the invader. Powered by a foreign spirit of death, the new creature born from this is undead, and usually more powerful than either its host or former body. 

5) Ascension: The only reason worth dying for. Hundreds upon hundreds of hellkin have gladly thrown away their lives (in some cases repeatedly, given reincarnation and possession) for the vague, intoxicating hope they might ascend. To ascend, is to become godlike, to rival the dark angels themselves. This is the rarest of the rare, a form of life after death so sought after, so hopelessly out of reach, that it is the secret dream of every creature in the Underworld. 

Of the handful that transformed, each varied in shape, size, and power level. 

The Meaning of Names

Dante - enduring

Vergil - strong

Trish - short for Patricia which means "noble"

Lucia - light

Eva - a form of Eve which means "life"

Alastor - "tormenting spirit" or "Nemesis"

Ifrit - derived from "efreet" or "jin" which were said to be elemental demons of fire


	16. Shades of the Heart

Disclaimer: Capcom owns DMC and its characters. This version of Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine.

A/N: Beware Trish haters, this's a Trish chapter.

The tri-branched candelabrum bore candlesticks that burned but didn't seem to melt. The light from this was meager, illuminating the wooden surface of the table on which it sat and barely five feet around beyond that. A lean figure scanning the interior of a thick book stood hidden in the dark, well away from the light's perimeter. The figure seemed to ignore the fact the library was too dark for human eyes to read by. But Trish wasn't human; she could see fine.

She was deep in thought.

**...**

Her orders had been to lure Sparda's progeny onto a secluded spawn-infested island. With that done, it was either continue playing the part of guide and ally, or openly betray him. Her master's plans were without flaw, so whatever she chose would neither help nor hinder, she was assured of that.

So she opted for a timely parting of ways.

The man, Dante, son of the Legendary Dark Knight Sparda, object of her Emperor's loathing and concern, was a buffoon. And obstinate. And a pig. And occasionally a snide bastard. Though gifted by the gods of good looks, the man was a far cry from the dignified figure his father once was, or so she'd been told. And the way he liked to call her "babe" it just...ugh! It never failed to make her hackles rise! 

In fact, it wasn't until they approached the back door to Mallet castle that her desire to leave intensified. She had watched as he drew the sword from his back - Force Edge, was it? - then calmly, without a word, proceeded to slice the lock cleanly in half. Just...swell. She had to resist the urge to slap her forehead after that.

Never mind that his display of manly ingenuity completely negated her brilliant foresight to _unlock_ the damn portal before they arrived...! So she decided to leave right then and there, happy and primed to ignore the questions that would inevitably form in his man-sized brain.

But then she was struck by the whim to test him. 

"The castle is above this cliff," she had told him at the gates. "Let's go!" 

A single effortless bound carried her well over the twenty foot cliff face and onto the rough path on its outcropping. A casual glance over the shoulder, and the discovery she was alone disappointed more than surprised her. She stood expectant for ten more heartbeats. He never showed.

So...did he pass your test? an inner voice had asked. 

A good question, considering she hadn't fully understood the point of the test. 

And then apprehension sent a shiver down her spine. By not following her lead, didn't that imply the half-breed's trust in her wasn't complete? It was paramount that trust be established quickly, then cemented to ensure the execution of her mission. Since her role was crucial for the continuance of her master's plans, failure was out of the question. 

Trish had seen firsthand the price of Mundus's displeasure; taught to her the first day of her life. "Born" into a young adult body, and blessed with a mature mind, her Emperor wasted no time giving her over to her tutor, Harbinger Knight Bolverk.

Knight, bishop, and inquisitor, the one-eyed devil took great pride in ferreting out insurgents. He impressed upon her the images and sounds of those he "interrogated," meanwhile teaching her the glories of Satan, and the dogma of His Church of Vice. 

The undead knight was making certain she never became a disappointment to his Emperor, and he was good at his job. Her second lesson reinforced her commitment for constant success. Only the most severely botched assignments - no matter their significance - always incited the Emperor's personal attention. In every case, Bolverk had her watch what happened to those that erred. 

And so, she was understandably shaken when the hunter didn't follow. 

Since then stretched her moment of sharpened dread. Logic insisted that these feelings were unfounded; she had done her job bringing Sparda's human son here, her part in this elaborate death trap was _over_! But this...this wasn't mere doubt or fear for her continued well-being, was it?

Premonition? 

Trish didn't consider herself a superstitious devil. She believed in what she could see. She made her own luck. She relied on no one. She believed in her ability to combat any obstacles in her way, and she sure as Hell believed in her own strengths. Trish refused to accept a predetermined future - portents of disaster be damned! 

Mundus kept her on a short enough leash as it was...she didn't need witchy Fate pulling her strings, too.

_Think_,_ Trish_. _You have nothing to worry about_.

She successfully completed her mission. The big bad spawn hunter continued to trust her, as far as she knew, and there were no reasons to prove her otherwise. She could manipulate him whenever she wanted. She'd have to locate the fool, though, which wasn't hard if one only listened. Even now, somewhere beyond the layers of mason stone the scream of something paying with its life was unmistakable. 

Finding him was easy, actually _spying _on him was a bit of a trick.She last saw him rooting around a small network of caves on a cliff side facing the reddening western sky. The pack of free-roaming Blades occupying the area at the time didn't even know what hit them. That was almost fifteen minutes ago. Trish knew him to be an efficient hunter, so she was willing to bet her left arm he had progressed far since then. 

She remembered times when he would look over his shoulder, always under the weight of secret eyes but never knowing where they came from, or by whom. Trish was not so naive as to believe he didn't suspect her, but as long as his uncertainty shrouded her, that was all that mattered. With nothing more pressing to do than explore the island's ruined decor, this was the most constructive thing she thought she could do for her master...and herself. No doubt Emperor Mundus would look favorably upon her efforts and reward her? A girl can dream. And the best part about this whole business? Her hands were washed of any responsibility for the half-breed. So there, no reason to get all bent out of shape... 

_Then why do I feel like running as fast and as far away from here as possible_?

Reality began seeping into her musings, focus returning to the thing in her hands. The massive book was heavy, but not so heavy she couldn't comfortably carry it. It was a tome consisting of a thousand and some hundred pages - by her estimate - the words within written in a human language she didn't know. The title on its dull, black leather spine was stamped in red, framed in gold, and similarly beyond her comprehension. The author's name had been left out apparently - probably written by a lowly scribe who's name wasn't worth remembering. Inside the book was a compilation of...dates? Events? Chosen at random, boredom led her hand to this book, curiosity insisted she delve into it. Dates, events....records? Labels followed by numerals followed by sentences. 

Then it documented the bygone livelihood of those that inhabited Mallet Island? Well, whatever their meaning, they were nothing but scratches in faded ink to her. 

Trish turned the page -

- realization made her take a sharp breath. Lost in reverie, she had gone through nearly half of the thousand-page book. Her movements must have been purely mechanical the entire time - she couldn't remember turning so many pages! This happenstance struck her something like a wet rag. The mere act of turning paper sheets didn't disturb her so much so as what it could mean. Trish didn't act this way. It was against her nature, losing herself in thought so deep. For awareness to dissolve so thoroughly was dangerous business -

- _You're making a big deal out of this _-

- One half of the book rested in her left hand, that last half in her right -

- _What am I doing_? 

"Distractions have dethroned more kings, destroyed more nations than any other whim, malady, or revolution in mortal history," Bolverk had once told her. "An unfocused mind is..." He had set his hounds on her after that, just to see if she was paying attention. 

Damn it! She was always in control, she didn't allow thoughts to cloud her senses in the way they had just now. So why now?

Charging through the still air was another muffled shriek of demonic pain.

Eyes narrowing slightly, Trish slammed the tome shut. This, the ancient volume couldn't take, and she watched as it disintegrated, escaping her grasp which wasn't too intent on holding the book anymore. Loose sheets spun away like little yellow kites as the tattered book made an undignified _plompf_! against the library floor. For a few prolonged seconds Trish stared at the sad state of the half-decayed text, not really seeing it, fists at her sides. 

_What are you doing_, _girl_? Why _are you doing it_? _You're fraying at the edges_, _for what_? _You're not integral to the mission anymore_ and _the hunter is tightening his own noose. Safe on all bases. So you're spending your free time in reflection_, _that's _fine! _Even devils may daydream every now and then_. _So get a grip_,_ you're better than this_, _always in control_... _No more trying to second guess the Fates._ _No more_ _reading between the lines of everything you do_. _Ever since you brought Sparda_'_s _-

- Another scream -

"Dante..." she heard herself breathe -

- And chasing that, an explosion that shook everything. 

Her knees trembled with the concussion but she remained on her feet. Dust fell like gauze-thin curtains from the ceiling, ancient books in their rickety shelves jumped in place or fell to ruin on the floor. The quake faded like a distant avalanche, leaving a silence so deep it hurt her ears. Adrenalin kept her reflexes on edge.

Trish was sure the library would've collapsed if the blast had been any closer. She ruffled the dust from her honey-blonde hair, then quickly glanced up at a peculiar sound: The low decibel of grinding stone. The narrow span joining the second floor's twin walkways was badly fractured down the middle - a very disconcerting development, considering she was standing _right beneath_ the damn thing! Since "getting squished" was not on her to-do list, Trish wisely sidled out of harms way. 

Broken bridge here, some fallen books there, and powdered stone coating all of the above. She listened, ears pricked. Nothing beyond the pounding of her own heart. She strained to hear...

There! Gunfire! Easily perceptible now.

_What is he _doing? _Fighting the Emperor himself_?

Trish was gone in a flash of sizzling yellow electricity before the string of reports died into echoes.


	17. Gladiators

Disclaimer: Capcom owns DMC and its characters. This version of Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. **R **for violence and blood.

Bustahead: O.O Here you go! Another chapter! 

Tragedy Ann: The fact that you read and liked the Trish chapter just shows I'm doing something right. Thanks! 

Burryk: In answer to your Angelo/Nightmare question: Yes. Don't know when I'll get to it, though. As for the Frosts' intro, we shall see... 

Tracking the hunter in the form of pure energy was akin to thought: Both were instantaneous. So was the shock of materializing on the highest level of the coliseum in the middle of the storm of the century! 

Crimson lightning slashed the underbelly of slow-swirling, iron gray clouds. Sheets of icy, blinding rain riding wild winds seemed bent on drowning her where she stood. Trish flattened herself against the walkway floor before a howling gust could bull her pinwheeling over the edge. Her senses battled against the confusing maelstrom. Could this be it? Was her master's plan coming to fruition? She expected that opening the Gates of Hell would be tumultuous at least, but this....wait.... This couldn't be the telltale storm of enemy worlds colliding...and it was too soon.

Gunfire from the arena below!

In response there was a flurry of dark feathered wings - one a tattered stump at mid-wing - then a brilliant flare, and an elemental roar. It was General Griffon, alright. With the realization that it was Griffon, her next thought toddled to the fore with no small amount of annoyance.

__

Well,_ this explains the lousy weather_. _Note to self_: _Don't wear skin-tight leather in a downpour ever again_. _Cold as sin_, _and it chafes_.

But why was the General so badly wounded? Other than the numerous broken feathers in the trampled mud, there was no sign of the dismembered wing. Trish had watched the previous two encounters of demon against hunter, and both times Griffon had avoided permanent injury. This development was a surprise. The loss of his wing officially made the demon bird ground bound for the rest of his life, however long that would be. How had Dante done this? Taking down Phantom was indeed a feat, but to do this to Griffon, Phantom's superior? The only explanation for the Death General's perplexing state was that he was distracted somehow. Even now, Trish recognized the frenzy of demon rage - not a typical mode of attack for Griffon.

Rule number one: Remain focused in all your endeavors, and never stray. A simple rule the hell-bird should not have forgotten considering his devotion to his Emperor. Ever since his second encounter with Sparda's whelp.... 

Trish's gaze concentrated on the two combating shapes five stories below her. Lit gas-flame blue from below by a softly pulsing runic circle in the amphitheatre's center, their silhouettes blurred by the gray rain, Trish thought it was like staring into an under-lit aquarium. 

_When did those runes get there_? _Weren't there before_..._strange_... 

Bathed in the arcane light, another major detail swam into focus: Large chunks of rubble littered the fighting pit. The overpass had collapsed - probably the cause of the "explosion" she had heard in the library. In its place, hung suspended was a block of stone - column-shaped, the bottom tapering to a point - some six stories above the eerie runes. 

Lightning ripped, thunder tore, but it was the bright flash of steel that almost made Trish blink. 

Alastor bit deep into the ruined stump of Griffon's left wing, and stuck. The demon snarled and tried to bite into his attacker. Before the powerful jaws could clamp down, the hunter violently twisted his sword with upper body strength alone, wrenched free, and barely escaped a cascade of demon life blood as he hit the ground running. Suddenly the smell of churned mud and rain mixed with a thick, coppery tang. Griffon roared horrendously, but to his credit, pressed the offensive, and released a flood of energy from the core in his chest. 

Angling beams, spheres, curtains, and straight bars of electricity hurdled in every direction imaginable; there was no way the half-breed could dodge them all. Despite the sting of rain in her eyes, Trish watched in stunned disbelief as hunter became azure-shrouded knight. 

_Fast_! 

He _blurred _over-around-under every deadly attack as if they had no momentum of their own, and Trish was sure, had it not been for the afterglow of his aura, it would've appeared as if he teleported into Griffon's guard. In a blaze of erupting power the knight flung Alastor spinning into the General's wound before the demon even had time to react. The devil arms circled back, returning to its master's gloved hand completely drenching in red, and draped with torn sinew. Rain didn't immediately cleanse the fell blade. The whole round trip had taken less than two heartbeats, but by then the Death General was howling madly, bleeding profusely from a wing stump now shaved of thirty pounds of meat. 

_He's bleeding Griffon into submission_! _Incredible_! 

Trish watched mesmerized as hulking Griffon staggered away with a baritone groan, trembling from blood loss and pain. The hunter didn't press the attack as his adversary placed considerable distance between them. Griffon rounded before stumbling into the tiers, agony and fury burning in every eye. The monster charged. The hunter scowled in disgust, then charged in turn as the fleet-footed knight to compensate for Griffon's longer stride. They were two hundred feet apart at the start. 

The storm was beginning to die - They covered ground startling fast!

The rain slowed slightly - Halfway! Neither meant to stop!

The rain fell like tears - This was it!

Trish held her breath -

- when the mother of all lightning bolts stole her vision the moment the foes collided. Clamping hands over ears, she couldn't hear her own colorful curses - let alone the deathblow - as the concussive force of superheated air boomed with enough energy to signal the End Times. The toll of thunder echoed outward toward the horizons like the departing hoof beats of the Four Horsemen.

Silent ruby lights flickered across the stilling dreary sky. The rain became a heavy sprinkle. The wind thrashed, but nothing like before. Trish uncurled from her defensive posture, a needling ringing in her ears telling her that her hearing would return in a few minutes...but what of Griffon and -

- Her gazed locked in place. 

The Death General toppled to the ground, landing squarely on the runes. Dante replaced sword Alastor - now unblemished and glittering coldly - onto his back next to the Force Edge. Standing a short distance from the fallen demon's great head, he did not exhibit the air of a victor. Odd. 

His back turned to her, shoulders not-quite-straight, Trish could only guess at his expression. 


	18. Made to be Broken

Disclaimer: Capcom owns DMC and its characters. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. **R** for the usual good stuff. And angst, juicy, juicy angst.

A/N: I wrote this while listening to Evanescence, specifically the song _Tourniquet_. Entirely unplanned, this chapter eerily echoes the song's lyrics! Also, the [flash!] signifies a flash of memory. The memories belong to Griffon, who is remembering moments of the coliseum battle from its beginning, winding down to present time (the second you guys enter his head.) 

[Griffon's POV]

[Flash!] 

"Pretender! We fight! For the last time!"

"Bring it on, Polly!"

[Flash!]

"Your back to the wall, and nowhere to run. Admit it! Admit what you really are! Detestable insect! Fraud!"

"Sounds like you're the one that needs to admit something, feather face."

"Liar! Die!"

[Flash!]

"Still you persist....!" 

"Blame it on my upbringing. Dad didn't believe in quitters, an' neither do I!"

"You're father...?"

"Yeah, Sparda!"

__

Pain! _My wing_!

__

Falling...

[Flash!]

__

Charging. 

__

Fury!

__

Bright steel sheathed in savage light.

__

Blood, _lungs burning with fatigue_, _talons tearing into earth_!

__

The deathblow! 

__

Clarity...

[Flash!]

No!

By Satan's tarnished heart, no! What have I done! As the madness of denial ebbed from my mind to be replaced with sense and raking pain, I knew that I had done a terrible thing. Long ago, Sparda asked me to swear never to strike one of his blood. I agreed, dooming myself in my ignorance, as I would eventually come to find out. I didn't question my old friend, because I knew him to be a devil who valued integrity - an almost unheard of sentiment among our kind, but something he and I shared nonetheless...although...I had thought his request very unusual.

Sparda had no sired young at the time. 

But now I understood, generations upon generations later. I knew now what had prompted his request - his hidden plea - asking _me_, the only one who would listen, and obey. I think....hard to think now, but....

I'm _sure _this revelation came to me as I fought his son for the last time. I remember the awesome strength of my own determination as I dove into the fight that would eventually take my wing, and my life. The pretender would finally fall! But when his power surged to clash with mine, I must have known the truth then. Yes, I did; I remember the emptiness I felt inside me when I did. Though sadly misused, the half-breed's power was...frightening. Almost a mirror of Sparda's own, but somehow...more. 

But my memory was tortured with past humiliations, and my pride would not allow me to bow away gracefully. One does not allow a lesser being to spit in your face, and merely forget! But this was not a lesser being, I had told myself, but an equal. Perhaps my better. 

__

How could I _accept this _without breaking my oath to Sparda _while _obeying my master's orders!? My throat had constricted painfully around the simple truth: I couldn't do both. My own principles had betrayed me! Damn you Sparda! You knew something like this would happen! And you still...! 

__

Raarrrgh! But you're dead and dust and I don't have to abide by your wishes anymore! Yet I tried. I tried to do both! I shouldn't care anymore, I shouldn't care about the promise I made to you, but I did, I _still _do! To forget, is to give up who I am, and...and I don't want that to happen... 

To adopt a different way now, after so many long years, would be blasphemy and the harshest, most damaging insult to my beliefs. It would be like saying I never believed in my code, that my honor was a facade I could don or discard whenever I needed to conform. So I went mad with shame and bitter, bitter rage, surrendering myself to my basest demonic instincts.

I lashed out at Sparda's blood. How ironic. I condemn myself _now_ when I should have done so the first time I encountered the hunter. 

And now I fell. My core - the one part of me I had always thought indestructible - had been struck a mortal blow. I fell. My body met the ground with punishing force, the sound of it carrying over the coliseum in lingering swells. Something inside me gave, I think. Bone. Organ. Didn't know. Didn't care. I welcomed the end.

And then I was floating. Pale light all around me, lifting me. It was...nice. I spread my wings, thinking I could fly away from the obligations, the pain, my own integrity, at least for as long as it would take me to regain my strength. And then a disembodied voice murmured dryly in my head, telling me the coliseum received the sacrifice, and was appeased. I suddenly became aware of the runes below me, and the awful hunger it radiated in festering waves. The very same waves that lifted me now...

My blood ran like ice in my veins. 

Something heavy, something _massive_ rammed between my shoulder blades, crushing bone, pulping muscle and bursting vitals before I even had time to gasp! Dark spirits, I felt my body break with sickening ease as I was violently returned to earth, and pinned in place! It wasn't until my core mostly smashed beneath me - that my vision swam - did the full scope of my peril finally dawn upon me.

I shrieked, and I could taste thick blood.

Pain! So all-consuming, so indescribable, that the shock of devastating injury could not numb my mind enough to help. Hard to breathe! I thought now I might die, but I didn't. It takes a lot to kill a General of death. And there he was, Sparda's son. His eyes damned me for my stupidity, but there was the shade of regret in there, too - almost completely eclipsed by revulsion of my demonic heritage, but I saw it. 

He must have sensed my internal struggle during our duel - deemed me unfit to fight - yet was forced to defend himself, anyway. He hesitated to kill me so many times in my foolish rage... It's the reason why my wing is mostly gone. He hadn't shown me mercy, for which I am glad; mercy was for the weak. Dissuading me with pain and blood loss, though an act of warrior's respect, had proven little more than fuel for my wrath. I doubt anything could have stopped me, then. Dealing death had been his last resort.

But I had to tell him...! At least acknowledge what I've finally come to admit to myself! It was difficult lifting my head off the ground - 

- the ground...the runes no longer shone blue, but were tinted red with my -

- Had to say something! 

"Yours are definitely the powers of Sparda," I gasped, my words filled with the weight of importance. "No, even more so..."

I wanted to say more, but I was so weak... And then I found a reservoir of strength in a single, delirious notion: Sparda was dead, as was my promise to him, yet I could _still _redeem myself in a way. I failed my master too many times already; if I can help it, let my final act be to remedy my wrongs. At least then I'd know a measure of peace. Dying seemed to have slackened my principles.

"But I cannot let you live, for I serve my master, Mundus."

The hunter stepped forward with a protest, but I was beyond the ability to hear him. I only knew what must be done before it was too late. I raised my face toward the weeping sky as my storm slowly died with me. 

I shouted in wild hope, "Mighty is the power of Mundus! Master! Grant me one last surge of power...the power to _finish him_!"

And my master appeared. In a roar of arcane might he appeared high above the coliseum, the heavens roiling about his avatar, the Three Eyed. Like brilliant scarlet novas, each eye was positioned at a certain point opposite one another to create a perfect triangle. He was glorious. My eyelids weighed heavily with Death's shadow, yet even now my relief matched that of the damned grasping redemption. 

"Master...Mundus..." 

"Griffon!" Master's booming voice cut the air with the finality of a guillotine. "You have failed me. You are no longer worthy."

No...nonononono....!

I reduced myself to begging as I feebly struggled to stand. My body betrayed me, punishing me with new agony. I couldn't even die on my own two feet! Meanwhile, the air had grown extremely volatile with power - my Emperor's strength fusing, enhancing, _devouring _the remnants of my own wasted energies. Wrenched from my control, the clouds boiled, and the rains redoubled their cold sting. Screaming bolts of electricity and godlike forces writhed above me, eager to feed -

- and there she was. High above - smartly hidden but watching everything - the only other witness to my execution, and my master's current favored agent. Trish. 

Our eyes met, held, and I knew she could see my tormented plea as clearly as I could see her bland indifference. Abandoning the last of my dignity - conforming was not so hard, after all - I urgently, silently cried out to her with my mind. No response. I would get no aid from her. Just before she averted her frosty gaze from me, I thought I saw her mask of apathy crack. I felt it now, an emotion she hoped I would understand. She was sorry. 

And I knew why. 

I had failed for the last time. No more chances for me. 

Those were the rules. 

Chasm: I'm in the middle of the next chapter so it will take a while.


	19. Chimerical

Disclaimer: Capcom owns DMC and its characters. This version of Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. **R **for language.

A/N: Trish is remembering what Dante said after Griffon's death.

****

Trish left the coliseum with a lot on her mind. Dante's unprompted speech had struck a chord, as well as make a magnificent jumble of her emotions.

"...His heinous ways make me sick, killing even his own, like they were _nothing_..."

And why not? An Emperor was practically divine. Whether he was one of the Fallen was irrelevant; an Emperor had every right and right over everything, living or no. Would a human allow a beast of burden to continue serving him if it was lame? No, of course not. 

Griffon served loyally enough, but his failures had crippled him. Would a human allow sick crops to grow among the healthy ones? No. Griffon failed, which meant he was weak, which meant he must be culled from the strong. His death now made it possible for a stronger, more capable General to rise and make a name for himself. It was all for the betterment of the Devil Kingdom. It was natural, and therefore made it right.

"He's the one that took the life of my mother, my brother. I'm sure of it."

Dante had spoken with the same conviction of someone who's doubts had been lifted after long years of searching. Trish pictured his eyes in her mind as he firmly gripped the pendant about his neck. She had imagined the gravity of insight passing between those determined blue eyes into to the garnet stone in his hand, empowering it. An absurd notion, of course; it was just a rock. And then she went on to imagine the sound of his fate swing shut like a gigantic pair of steel doors... 

_Hm_. _Now he knows_. _My master murdered his family_,_ and now he knows_. _Why does this bother me_? _It_'_s not like I give a rat_'_s ass what he does with this information_,_ and there is _nothing _he can do that would matter_ _in the long run. Oh fuck... _

She was deliberating again. Damn it, she had thought she was over this issue! And the migraine rooting between her eyes wasn't much fun either. She tried to ignore both but only succeeded against one. 

Suddenly unable to keep still, she pushed off the bookshelf she had been leaning against, and began a restless pace in the darkened library. The book she had dropped earlier lay demolished in her path. On impulse she scooped up most of the text before tossing it carelessly into a corner. 

"My mother always told me my father fought for the people. He had courage and a righteous heart."

Serpent Almighty, now _that _one had nearly floored her! Luckily, she had managed to keep herself upright while fixing her expression into a credible display of neutrality, thus saving herself from a possibly fatal session of Q and A. The corners of her mouth quirked up in a thin, humorless smile. The idiot. No, maybe that was too harsh a term...better to say he was totally oblivious. 

_Courageous_? _Righteous_? _Well hot damn_, _man_, _let_'s _bring out the bubbly and celebrate because_ _Daddy_'_s_ _a whoop-de-freaking saint_! _No really_, _it_ _was so paternal of Sparda to raise a family when a fallen angel and all of Hell were baying for his bloody head on a bloody pike_! 

Trish hadn't understood Dante then and she didn't understand him now. In fact, he had puzzled her ever since the first night they met. He was right to venerate an incredible devil like Sparda, but to go on and say he was a benevolent, virtuous defender of humanity and good, a loving father with little to no fault, was a bald-faced lie! Had to be. Sparda had been a devil, first and foremost. Just hearing Dante mislead himself like that....it was painful. 

The smile fled from her lips. Loosely crossing her arms, Trish slowed her nervous steps to a more leisurely speed. At least rationalizing away his words had calmed her somewhat.

__

He should be cursing his father for all his grief, _not Mundus_. _No one rebels against the Emperor and lives for very long_, _even the Legendary Knight must have known this_. _The day he dared to dream of his family-to-be was the day he sentenced them to death_. _Oh yeah_, _great role model_, _Dante_.

After a few minutes spent finally cataloguing her thoughts on their proper shelves, Trish came to the grudging conclusion that, despite whatever faults she saw in him, Dante had proven time and again he was an intelligent fighter. 

_Brave too_, _in a gung_-_ho_, _smart_-_ass sort of way_._ The nut_. 

He was prideful, but not blinded by it. Persistent when he set his sights, but clever enough to persevere against steep odds where any lesser being would have called it quits from the start. Still, in the end, none of this would save him. So, he was destined to die ignominiously on a forsaken isle, just as her master predicted? Tch! What a waste of a powerful bloodline. It was shameful.

Trish let her lids slide close, a frown on her forehead as she slowed her already unhurried stride. Pause. Pivot on left heel. Stop.

"In the name of my father, I _will _kill Mundus!"

Oh please... It was presumptuous to think anyone could. Vengeance against Mundus would only earn him certain death. Whether he suffered at all in the end depended entirely on the Emperor's disposition at the time. But that's only _if _Dante survived the last of Mallet's little surprises, at which point he'd have to gain access into Hell, fight off its varied denizens, bypass its many wards - all this without getting hopelessly lost - find, then storm the throne room, which ultimately amounted to death in the name of a memory.

The very idea of dying for an intangible goal was so totally alien to Trish, that it was difficult to feel anything but detached curiosity beside the doubts. Her ken never pursued revenge against another unless they could profit from it in some material way. 

_But not him_, _why is that_? _He has the blood of the devils_...

A leviathan groan coursed from one end of the library to the other and beyond, the sound like a sonorous ring that was as primordial as it was unearthly. It lasted mere seconds, then silence. Scrutiny forgotten, Trish jerked her attention everywhere she could, hoping to spot the threat first. Nothing happened. Nothing came at her. Nothing, for five heartbeats and counting. It was as if the strange wail had sucked within it all sounds inherent to the world, leaving behind the gift of absolute silence. Something prickled her need to make for the exit. _Now_.

Backing toward the double-doors, Trish suddenly felt very alone and vulnerable. At that moment, thick, malicious taint saturated every book and shelf, every granule of dust and stone, down to the molecule. The sheer strength of it made her skin itch and sting. Realizing she wasn't going to get out in time Trish clenched her jaws and grimly waited for the unknown. Eyes of cool blue became smoldering pits of sulfurous yellow. 

And then the library fragmented like crystal, and exploded. 


	20. Devil Storm

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. **R **for some language.

Kikoken: I'm liking DMC 3: Successor, of course!

****

A bright moon-glow replaced feeble candlelight as the library ceased to exist. 

Trish responded with devastating violence of her own. 

Her powers burst its banks in answer to her angry call, hurtling together with her furious need to survive. Under less stressful circumstances, she would have concentrated her energies through her hands. Now, she used her entire body as a conduit, becoming a living livewire as she released all her ire in a swelling globe of searing, sun-yellow light, instantly undoing the soaking from Griffon's final storm.

The light continued to expand, encompassing her and the ground where she stood. A slicing gesture stumped its growth as the blonde devil admired her handiwork within the five feet of clearance she had left herself. Trish practically seared with pride. As a result of her instinctive outburst, the small island beneath her feet had suffered, becoming more akin to gravel than broken tile. 

Comparable to the refuse of an infant universe, the heftiest debris' were dominating, irregular, sharp-edged. Titans that dwarfed her by dozens of feet or more, each traveled at extreme velocities. 

_What was that saying about Kansas_...? 

Red lips broadened into a self-satisfied smile as a legion of stones pulverized themselves against her nebulous globe; _smash_, halt, and break apart in less time than it took to form a thought. Anything less than man-sized was ionized. Even the ones that grazed the luminous skin careened away as the first stages of disintegration devoured them. 

Serrated snakes of electricity curled and leaped and hissed from her sphere of power, mowing into the rubble cloud as if starved of things to destroy.

Trish threw her head back with an exhilarated, if feral, grin that stretched her painted lips thin. Long honey-colored tresses whipped and danced to her beat as she flung her arms to her sides, chest puffed out, a low, chuckling growl rising in her throat. Even with the barest beginnings of strain tightening the corners of her eyes, she felt like she was straddling the world. Trish seized her anger, caressed it, nourished it with the predatory joy of pushing back a threat and succeeding wholesale. This felt _good_.

..._Royally pissed off and ecstatic beyond words_...! _Dark God_, _this is better than sex_!

She couldn't remember the last time she was allowed to cut loose so completely with her arcane abilities. These feelings of invincibility and immortality, they were the same with every creature who shared her unholy blood; anyone with the power to subjugate or destroy deserved this pleasure. 

In a brief - _brief _- splinter of thought, Trish wondered if Dante had ever felt what she felt now. The question quickly died with a long, giddy howl of laughter, the maelstrom and her arcani competing against themselves with primal snarls of windless gales and destruction. The discord of meteor-like bodies crashing into one another was a constant din, thrumming so loudly in her ears they slowly filled with a cotton-like numbness. 

_Don_'_t_ _care_.

Eyes ablaze, her sight pierced through the shifting layers of her barrier, at the cataclysm of a never ending storm. The projectile-cloud was so thick there could not possibly be _anything _left beyond the shattered ground on which she stood. 

Gazing deep into the frenzied gray nothingness, Trish _dared _it to touch her. But of course, it could do nothing. No, it couldn't get through her defenses at all, though it tried to with a fierce will. Trish thrilled at her unstoppable rage, her diabolic nature, fully reveling in her rare moment of supreme arrogance - 

- when the void stared back. 

All good feelings fled in stark terror. There was no transition between her joy and the fear that followed, just the sensation of something very heavy, and very cold twisting in her gut. Though there were no physical eyes to speak of, they blasted her with their presence all the same. Her eyes fluttered as if just awakening, losing most of their fire. Her shoulders straightened at attention with her spine. She was shaking inside. The power which kept her hair aloft faded in degrees, allowing her mane to gather lifelessly at her back. 

The shield wavered before she realized it.

It shimmered in hues of amber, growing too flimsy to serve as anything more than a strong buffer. Immediately she was assailed by stones the size of her torso or bigger, everything smaller simply veering away with the sound of a gun report. All debris had fine edges from constant collisions - chip after chip after chip - becoming as sharp as freshly whetted knives. And even as sizeable as they were, they cut the air with supernatural speeds. The shockwaves of crashing bodies alone were enough to quiver her insides and make footing considerably difficult to maintain. Trish didn't stop to wonder what may be waiting for her beyond the edge of her island if she fell...

Trembling, the blonde spy still had enough of a mind to reestablish her defenses with post haste. In half a thought process, her shield was up and crackling again.

However, in that time, an unseen stream of comets had buzzed within centimeters of taking her head along with them. At _least _eighty more deep-toned bees had blurred by, creating a nightmare freeway all around her. Countless dozens had been larger than herself, leaving her breathless in their wake. She felt her hair respond to every pass, and it had been hard to keep her nerve - and her knees - from turning into putty. Blurred by distance and great speed, a host of shapes the size of small houses collided against each other with tremendous force. 

Her brain was still processing the brutal impacts when the cloud of heavy shrapnel whistled shrilly toward her - suddenly around her!? - like buckshot. But now she was safe behind her cocoon of light. Relatively. Her breath rasped harshly against her throat. She couldn't blink. She couldn't stop shaking. She wanted to sit down but didn't move.

_Holy fuck Satan help me I_'_m _dead _I died I_'_m..._! _N-no...still here_?_ Still alive..._

Alive and unscathed. Odds like that did not exist. Slowly budding relief soon found itself rudely quashed by another emotion: urgency.

_Oh_..._Hell_. _Sssshhit_ _what is going on_!? _Who could have_...? _Was it_...? _No_,_ girl_! _Pointless guessing bad_! _Just get _out! 

When she was safe again would she begin to speculate who or what attacked her.

_Outoutout_! 

Discarding anymore visions of herself as a corpse, Trish reigned in her scattered arcani, focused it within her, and condensed it into a restless thing. 

Lids half-closed in grim concentration, she sensed the sulfuric beast welling up inside her in obedient swells. The energy began manifesting itself long before it fully matured, seeping from its mistress in pulses of golden light that outshone her sphere at the birth of each throb. The metallic light charged and charged, suddenly throwing off madly hissing sparks that instinctively sought out the churning limbo, their orders half-formed but their need to destroy already driving them. Eventually the globular beats of her latest trump card met and merged outlines with her barrier. Her barrier was instantly assimilated. Trish's eyes snapped fully open, burning pits once more.

_This ends now_!

Her beast fed as she sundered its leash. 

The unknown presence still watched, unfazed by any emotion.

A soundless explosion of molten light flew outward from the small frame of the woman standing at its center. Dust and the smallest debris were repulsed by the intense, radiant heat. Things of greater mass were stoically consumed by the main body. 

And then the shockwave brought with it an awesome, tolling thunder that was more felt than heard. Not one, but two, flat rings of light - traced with white-hot edges - raced ahead of the destruction, expanding rapidly in diameter as they sliced into any obstacles in their path. More than one fair-sized hill was cleaved in two. Nothing seemed to exist that was larger than a small planetoid, and those were gashed, then ponderously nudged away. Anything that wasn't blown apart, diced, or scorched simply became fuel for a maturing blast radius. 

And in its reactor-like core, was Trish. 

Exertion and wonder had wiped away the trivial thing called fear, the former quaking throughout her body, the latter dulling her senses in a kind of shock. Half aware of the lights and sounds that swirled like velvet sheets all about her, and the persistent tug of unruly locks writhing wildly above her head, it was the feeling of _power _- pure, hot, not-quite-unbridled-but-pretty-damn-close power - that she would never forget.

Never had she unleashed so much all at once! This was an incredible first! Eyes that mirrored infernal torches were flung wide, her face exuberant again but unable to fully hide the pain of effort. Sweat ran freely down her temples and neck, between her breasts, and between her shoulder blades. Her arms were rigid at her sides and slightly held back, her hands were splayed as if to welcome back the power she freed in brilliant surges. 

Trish hated it, but she was reaching her limits. 

The blonde was slow to react when an impossible sight met her eyes. 

Through her arcani she could perceive the world with altered senses; the experience was not unlike her perceptions while morphed into pure electricity. Trish saw through the 'eyes' of the blast sphere - the outer reaches of it almost a mile distant - and still - _Dark spirits_! - still the nothingness waited for her! Just a world of shifting grays that stretched to eternity! 

She had thought she was making progress finally...

A blind charge into the unknown would probably have produced better results than this! But...maybe not; Trish felt particularly defeatist at the moment. With an agonized moan, she struggled against the logic of surrendering to the futility of it all. Slowly, she reversed the globes momentum, drawing it back into her. Conserving strength was a must. 

Where _was _she? Another dimension, but why? She wasn't dead, therefore, this couldn't be literal Limbo. She sure as Hell wasn't hallucinating. But there was no way this could be part of the mortal realm, unless... 

Unless something had gone terribly wrong while opening the Gates...? No. No, that was even less of a possibility; her Emperor would never allow the total destruction of the world he so coveted. Then what of Mallet Island? And Sparda's avenging son? Had Dante been plunged into oblivion's clone along with her? 

Trish relaxed a bit. It was a selfish comfort, to believe she wasn't suffering alone. She tried to touch his mind with hers, convincing herself he was probably more reliable help than a posse of Mundus's unwilling servants, and better looking, too. 

Her heart skipped a beat. Her telepathy was blocked. 

The presence. It was there, watching her.

_Retreating _from her.

And it left a present floating mere inches from her nose. Trish nearly jumped out of her skin in surprise even as revulsion curled her upper lip. It was a ball of force, no bigger than a human eye. It smelled fiercely of death and ancient blood, so tainted was this thing, this distortion of the ambient light. Colorless, save for what refracted in its depths, ridiculously small, it was _hungry_. 

Suddenly, the thing gave vent to a banshee wail.

Trish screamed in pain, though she couldn't hear herself. Her arms instinctively flew to her head; whether to shield it from agony or try to keep it from exploding, synapses firing within her brain only told her to flee. Her barrier crackled once, then died, unnoticed. The blonde whipped away from the pain machine, staggering heels scraping across butchered tiles. And then there was sickening freefall... 

It saved her life.

Glass-like distortions flared bloody red as the ball continued that terrible, mind-piercing howl. It dove full tilt into the island she once stood. It passed clean through tile and foundation bedrock as if it were air, literally _eating _a perfectly spherical hole from end to end. Instead of pursuing the falling Trish, it veered around sharply for another bite, and another, and another, mindlessly trying to fill its bottomless hunger. Something else came at Trish just then. Something fast. Something glaring white. The shrieking faded, the pain followed. The world was overcome by swift movement and the white light that filled her vision....


	21. Surprise surprise!

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. The mystery demon is also mine, in a manner of speaking. You'll see what I mean...if I ever get to the next chapter that is. **R **for language.

Trish awoke without the memory of ever passing out. In memory's place throbbed a headache, lovingly tailored to her for maximum discomfort, it seemed, by the god of migraines. How sweet. The bastard really shouldn't have. Weak and sore, she made the bold attempt to rise from her prone position on the carpeted floor. Marginal success, plus vertigo. She propped herself up on one elbow after a slack jointed roll to one side, disorientation rocking the ground beneath her. She couldn't lift her head more than a couple inches. 

_Oh for the love of_...!

Disobedient neck muscles only encouraged the illusion her hair had gained tonnage. Though a cobweb of rich yellow tickled across her face to prove her wrong, she knew better. With a dramatic yet woozy declaration to the floor, the she-devil vowed vengeance on the villain responsible for transmuting her cherished locks into concrete! Mm-hm and then she was going to beat the living tar out of him with every cinderblock follicle! Damn right Hell hath no fury like a woman's scorn! 

Trish would've laughed had the effort not been a literal pain. That, and she felt about as strong as a day old whelp. Pfeh! And here she was plotting to go Salem on an imaginary offender...!

_ Arcanic whiplash. More fun than a barrel of mrisras. I guess trying to flash fry infinity will do that._

And what a ride that had been...

It was then the blonde decided it was good to be alive. Oh to just lie there, to breathe... She felt like shit but even that was pure pleasure when compared to the alternative. Living felt so good, in fact, she made a promise to herself: No more stupid risks, no more hesitations. If she was going to die on the job, then let it be for a worthier cause than...than whatever happened in the old library. She had to report to His Darkness about this, a.s.a.p...

But now that her vision concluded its carousel spin, she aimed to get a decent look at her new surroundings. Several tries and many potent curses later, she managed to glare about the room. 

Clear blue eyes adjusted quickly to the soft, indigoid light. It shone from everywhere, yet nowhere. Touching every surface, it cast gauze thin shadows where stone and rug and wood were not tinted with cave-like gloom. Tracing the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling, her gaze rested for a moment on the individual structural ribs. Each smooth shadowed arc slid down the lofty walls, soon splitting into twisted columns of which a few were possessed of undulating life. 

They ran parallel, guiding her attention toward the double-doors at the end of the long room. She herself lay at one end of the broad, rippled nave. Mindful not to move too quickly, Trish peered with some effort over her shoulder. From this angle, the altar on which the Pride of Lion once rested rose from the ground like a monolith. 

_I_'_m in_..._the cathedral_...? _Un_. _Fucking_. _Believable_. _I survived a killer library_,_ Limbo_,_ the blot of a thousand screams_..._to wake up in a House of God_. _Just when did I land on someone_'_s shit list_?

To call this a house of anything but corruption would be untrue, just as it was wrong to call the dimensional void "Limbo." She was not on holy ground - like everything else, this place was a lie - and she had not faced actual Limbo, for no one returned from that place. Still, referring to their doubles as if they were the genuine article was something she couldn't help.

The air here was cool, motionless. Thick with the smell of dust and woven fibers, the long carpet beneath her provided the only detectable scent. Ears pricked at the distant growl of thunder -

- Her sixth sense jerked awake, screaming madly! 

The taint of a stranger overcast her own. 

Stung with alarm the blonde shot to her feet. A mistake. A sincere groan. Dizziness cascaded across her vision as pain sliced into her brain. Fatigue became a burdensome load. Nausea flip-flopped her stomach. Cold sweat misted her brow. No doubt about it, she was definitely going to ask for a raise.

Overbalanced, the stricken spy wobbled backwards, gritting out a whimper as the pull of gravity latched firmly onto her leather clad rear. Instinctively she threw both hands behind her and, with a huff of relief, caught the trunk of the altar. What happened next went down with rapid fire precision.

The thing she had assumed was the altar....flexed. 

It was a thigh. 

A huge thigh attached to a huge leg. 

A huge thigh attached to a huge leg of rock hard muscle.

Covered with...

_Fur_?

A soft hiss followed the brush of cool scales against her naked shoulder. Aches and pains became a thing of the past in less than two seconds. With a choked squeal Trish hated herself for, she jumped - launched, actually - practically touching the dark ceiling arches. A gasp rattled from her throat as she drew level with the trio of oriel windows high above the altar. She could've sworn she floated there for at least a full minute. Yet again gravity couldn't keep its paws to itself, so insistent was it that she acquaint herself with the unyielding floor. Caught up in the moment, Trish scrunched her eyes shut, and wailed.

Like a screaming sack of flour she plunked right into the arms of her savior.

Said savior immediately set her down on her feet, one large hand enveloping her shoulder and upper arm just to keep her upright. 

"And here I thought Phantom could jump," quipped a voice like dark sand. "Your landing needs work, though. That said, I suggest you take this opportunity to save face, agent. Stand."

The big grip vanished, but marked her arm with a lighter-than-air sensation she heroically ignored. Must...stay...vertical! Another reptilian hiss popped her eyes open, post haste, every muscle tense and ready for another go at the ceiling. She registered three major qualities about the demon before anything else.

Size. Ten feet never looked so huge. From white-fuzzed muzzle to claw-tipped toes, the demon loomed so imposingly over her meager five-foot-nine it was ridiculous. But this wasn't overly surprising, oh no; spawn his size were not an uncommon sight. What really threw her for a loop was the fact this wall of demonkind had come upon her without warning!

Bulk. Most of the beast's brawn seemed to congregate around the thick chest. And then hairy arms folded across said chest. Trish was ogling, but she couldn't find the heart to care. That simple gesture shifted weight from one reverse articulated leg to the other -

- and _every muscle_ had rippled across the darkly tanned body, flashing her with immense physical power. Casual strength like that...Trish never saw outside the elite of Mundus's forces. The presence of mass was all the more augmented by the thick mane. Shaggy silver framed the angular, leonine face. Silver turned into basalt, glossy all the way down the neck, across the broad shoulders, tapering down chest and back. 

The eyes. They gleamed with the color of freshly minted gold. Without understanding why Trish found herself praying she never angered those metal eyes. Too, she recognized the race of this demon, this Helnyne. With a longsuffering sigh, the giant threw his arms into the air, feigned frustration clear on his face. The smirk stretched across long canines. 

"Do you gawk at every stranger that comes along, or am I just the lucky one....? Sins alive, _blink_, woman! I'm not part of the sideshow." 

With a start, Trish spat a silent curse as the heat of embarrassment rose to her ears. Nowhere in the history tomes did it say agents of the Emperor should _ogle _on the job! On second thought, 'embarrassment' couldn't quite encompass the feelings she felt right then. 

_Damn it damn it damn _it! 

From practically the start of her mission, her conduct had taken an abysmal plunge into a well of internal conflict. Whatever idiotic, nonsensical thoughts she may have had then _should not _have lingered until now! Why was it so hard to get back on track? Why did she still suffer this relentless feeling that something was amiss, this gnawing of her conscience, eating away the bones of her principles like weak acid until all that she'd known skewed on a foundation of confusing mush. 

_It_'_s_ his _fault_, _ever since we met_. _It_'_s all been _him _from the start_!

Dante defended humanity, yet he owed them nothing, these fleshlings who lived petty existences. If he was truly devoted to the path of vengeance, as he claimed, then why try to save everyone and their mother along the way? They distracted, they burdened, and he would die for them one day. Why? For a memory of the murdered. Pointless. He allows their ghosts to haunt him, for what? Because he felt obligated to uphold his father's "righteous" ideals? Because they loved him and he love them? Bullshit. Sparda couldn't know love; he was a devil, an exile, and probably wanted to fuck that day he saw the fair-haired woman who's likeness Trish now bore. 

_Devils_ _don_'_t_ _love_, _they use_. _Humans are no better_.

If someone walked up to her right now and told her she would give birth to a human infant, she would have ripped the messenger's throat out, then tore out the thing growing inside her. Trish expected no less from Dante's mother, and yet...

And yet he still lived. Because of her sacrifice, he managed to survive up to this point. To love the abominations that mankind and his religion so naturally shunned... It was unthinkable this woman - Eva, Dante called her - could be so different from her kind. 

_He_'_s so much like her in that respect. _

So many so _many _more questions skimming through her brain that Trish just stopped asking altogether. That's it. Enough. Her mind didn't go blind to the questions - they still skittered across her mind's eye like quick little vermin - but now they were being collected, shelved, and painted over with her old way of thinking. She told herself she no longer cared why the hunter hadn't followed -

- _rejected me _-

- at her beckoning upon arriving on Mallet. She no longer questioned his actions against all that was Underworld - _like me _- or why the strength of his lineage could conquer Generals and Knights, but not his shattered past. 

But _now _it was more important to calm down, and quickly. Reality was setting in - making the demon's presence more pronounced - bringing with it the realization that she had nodded off into her own little world again.

Didn't matter how...sociable the helnyne giant appeared to be; demons betrayed and used just as often as devils. Trish put on her best I-mean-business-so-don't-screw-with-me face. She was calm. She was professional. She was collect. She was ice - 

- The helnyne wasn't smiling anymore. Her moment of weakness had not gone unnoticed. 

She was screwed.

Chasm: If anyone can come up with a better species name for my OC I'd be grateful. And also I'll give you credit for the idea in the next chapter. Thanks.


	22. Revelations

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. The helnyne demon is also mine. 

A/N: A "prowl" is a group or squad of demons/devils. Thank you Shanisasha for your help.

The demon moved so suddenly she didn't have time to blink. 

Instead of attacking her, he leaned forward, stopping just short of mashing his nose against hers.

Stifling her surprise, the blonde flinched back. Her pride screeched and slapped her, but she barely felt its sting beyond the scrutinizing discs of gold. Abruptly the demonic eyes diminished in their intensity by drastic degrees, becoming soft, even bland. As Trish remembered to breath she could detect the faint odor of ash clinging about him....and something else, something that was at odds with the first scent.

_I don_'_t understand you_, she thought, at the same time sensing just how accurate her admission felt. The helnyne quirked his mouth in a way that she thought he might respond to her silent confession. He didn't. Instead he spoke with the frankness of one who knew the immutable truth of things.

"I'm really not all that interesting, you know. You can gawk all you want, but I'm no different from you. We're devoted to the Master and his endeavors, we serve him unquestioningly because he will inevitably guide the Underworld down the path to greatness. He is _power_. To follow him is to attain that supreme end all we denizens crave: Revenge against _Him_." 

The demon spat the last word in distaste, a smoldering hatred in his eyes. Trish had seen that expression many times in other spawn at the mere mention of mankind's Creator...

"But Mundus can be a harsh slave driver," the helnyne went on, calmer now. "Of course, I can't see you complaining. Ever. You being his personal spy is more than anyspawn could hope for, and it's more than I can say for myself. For you see, I lead the fantastically exciting career of an errand boy. Yay. And speaking of debasing professions, I have orders to carry out, and none of them involve amusing myself with a blonde mute...though amusing it was." 

At this comment, Trish narrowed her eyes to dangerous slits.

"Quiet..." the demon remarked as he strode passed her field of vision, "...and so easy to read." 

In passing, the long leathers about his waist brushed across her bare arm. Trish suppressed a shiver as she struggled to subdue a flustered blush from her cheeks. It wasn't easy, what with her wits in a fabulously tangled heap.

_Easy to read_... _What does he mean by..._?! _Screw that_! _Son of a Nobody thinks he can get under just _anyone's_ skin_?_ Well I show him..._!

She whirled, fully intent on demonstrating just how _bad _her day had really been. Glaring knives in his back wasn't enough to get his attention, but she thought a lightning bolt up the ass might do the trick. The helnyne turned to face her, effectively ruining her plan of assault. The glitter in his golden stare instantly told her he had not been so oblivious to her hostile musings. Needless to say, this annoyed her to no end.

"By the way, I thought you should know, in case you didn't," he said casually. "Mundus rearranged the island. The castle, especially. When you explore it next you won't find certain doors anymore, nor the rooms that were once behind them. He does it to better guide Sparda's boy to him. "Poetic justice," he called it. He wants the hunter dead at all costs. Rumors say he's scared. I think this is so."

Not in the best of moods to begin with, Trish verily bristled as she stood up for the being that gave her life. 

"Bite your tongue, _demon_. Where do you get off saying that? Mundus fears no one, least of all a mortal." 

"Mundus fears," the helnyne defended flatly. "The hunter refuses to die, no matter how many warriors, or deadly traps His Darkness casts his way. It's unheard of; Mundus can't stand the thought of someone not dying on command. Whatever ungodly power that sustains the hunter's life, Mundus fears this, and what it might mean. He has become stupid in his fear."

Her voice was like chilled steel. "I beg to differ." 

_What is he thinking_? _Mundus will have his hide for this_! 

The bastard had the balls to look calmly at her. No...it was _patience _she saw! As if she were a stubborn whelp! 

_Argh_! _Mundus can have him_, _but not before me_!

Before she could indulge her violent urges, the blasphemer spoke again.

"Judging by your expression, you wish to re-educate me and my way of thinking. Fair enough. Then explain to this demon-of-profane-opinion why our magnificent and perfect leader neglected to warn you, his own creation?"

"Warn me of what?" she growled, power jumping between her fingertips. "Speak quickly, 'cause ignorance is bliss and you need to fry." 

"Speaking." He bowed his head in acquiescence. "The rooms that disappeared were sent somewhere, agent. Where do you think they went?"

"How in Hell should I kn -" 

But she did. Trish remembered a moment in limbo when her fury had died as suddenly as it did now. She sensed denial on her doorstep. 

Seeing comprehension wash away her fire, the demon nodded solemnly as he imparted the grievous news. 

"More than one prowl was decimated because their assigned posts decided to implode with them inside. I promise you they won't be missed. Mundus's vision has regrettably narrowed, and I doubt he sees anything beyond his need to kill the son of Sparda. And as our Emperor blinds himself with obsession, so do his servants suffer. He abandoned the prowls to death, just like you, because of his haste, and carelessness."

Trish felt her heart sink. With her mission complete, Mundus had allowed her to roam Mallet as she pleased. She had obediently accepted her temporary freedom without much thought. Even as hours slipped by, with no new orders forthcoming, she had stoically resigned herself to waiting. In her boredom, she had tackled self-appointed tasks in the vague hope her Emperor would notice her, and find use in her again. 

But if what this demon said was true... If the impossible had happened, and Mundus's personal vendetta had made him succumb to incompetence, then that could conceivably explain why she had been overlooked all this time. 

_No_. _It_'_s_ _a convenient explanation, it can_'_t be true. But what if..._

If it _was _true, then her future had just veered into a big steamy pile the size of Mount St. Helen. The only reason everyone tolerated her was because of Mundus. The only reason she was still breathing and in one piece was because Mundus, the angel that gave her life, protected her from the denizens of the Underworld who would just love to peel the flesh from her bones, merely because of the way she looked. The helnyne said something about rumors...and if _he _had gotten wind of Mundus's condition, then how many others knew? 

If her creator had become weakened in any way - like sinking into a single-minded fugue - then the masses of the Devil Kingdom wouldn't stand idle for long. The great Emperor may lose his seat of power with his attention fixed as it was... It was the nature of all hellkin to bite the hand that fed them. Only later, after they sated themselves with carnage, would they seat a new leader in the former ruler's place. 

For chaos to be born again, stability must first play its part. 

Trish fought the rising panic inside her as her worst fears became more and more real in her mind. Her eyes were clouded as she thought, again opening herself to an attack, though she couldn't care less at the moment.

"What do you suggest?" she heard herself ask. "If the situation is that bad..."

"Nothing."

"What?"

"Do nothing. Let it run its course like its done in the past." The demon crossed his arms. "Still, you might want to invest some time in finding somewhere to hide."

Trish shook her head. "You can't be serious. If things deteriorate anymore than they already have..."

"I am serious. You're a resilient girl, agent. Just look at you, standing there no worse for wear. Only you survived the clutches of limbo...albeit with a little help..." 

Realization found her with a visible jolt. Hells, she felt so _stupid _for not seeing it sooner! The demon may have had informants telling him about the unfortunate prowls, but there was no way he could've known about her erstwhile predicament in the void. 

That could only mean one thing. 

She opened her mouth to say something - hundreds of questions, a simple thank you - but never got the chance.

A distracting buzz filled her mind, just like before. The helnyne disappeared in the same white-hot flash of light which had, once upon a time, carried her from oblivion. The next moment she was blinded by yet another flash, this one a strobe of lightning from the brewing storm outside. The demon had timed it perfectly. Disoriented by a harsh double dose of sound and light, there was no way to track his exit. Even his taint had been shielded from her. 

As thunder became echoes, she thought she heard his parting words.

"You're welcome, agent."


	23. Just a Game: End Mission

Disclaimer: DMC and its characters belong to Capcom. The helnyne demon, his familiars, and Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. **PG**-**13**

Burryk: A miracle? Naahh. Just a fluke of flukes.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Seconds later found Trish exactly where the helnyne had left her: Half blind, with a mind awhirl with too _too _many damnable questions. When at last words found their way to her lips they were muttered, and dark. 

"That's it. No more. Whatever happens, happens. I've had it with this garbage..."

She looked tired, as if she had long fought the irresistible. A deadening emotion flit across the she-devil's features, and then she was gone with a crack of self-made light and thunder.

In one shadowed corner, something moved.

Body cloaked in summoned darkness, taint hidden behind his will, the helnyne stepped forward. He had suspected this would happen. Now it was clear she was going to take her job very seriously from this time forward. Despite all that he told her, she was going to forge ahead into the unknown, thoughts of the hunter be damned. Good. Newfound focus would come swiftly to her, the demon knew, but not now. First, solitude. She had much to think about, after all. 

The demon vanished in the light of his own exit. He didn't go far.

**...**

Once there were four main spires atop the sprawling cathedral roof, but elements and disrepair had crumbled that number down to two. The surviving twins protruded from the flowing domes of the rooftop like breakers in a frozen sea of slate. The four-sided structures gently curved skyward, tapering to a blunt point almost sixty feet in the air. The holy icons that once crowned their blocky points had ages since been removed. Pitted tiles ribbed the structures like the segmented armor of an insect. And then there were the ridges that traced their four corners. The hook-like projections, whether observed from five feet away or five-hundred, conveyed the irresistible sense of looking at a pair of giant, serrated spearheads. They stood equidistant from each other on large, wide, and raised platforms that were closely guarded at four points by gargoyles sunk to the waist in stone. 

The demon crouched between two such goggle-eyed statues.

With the vast majority of the church cordoned off by rubble, or dark power, he was assured his privacy here. The weather had fully deteriorated by the time he made his appearance. This pleased him. Even as the dusky sky opened up and drenched him fully, his mood could not be subdued. The storm signified the beginning of the end of mankind, and the rise of the Underworld. Too, his soaring disposition included the fine work he managed on Mundus's spy. 

He had lied to her. 

Mundus's plans were slow to fruition, slower than he had anticipated, and he was irritated by that, but the Emperor of the Devil Kingdom was hardly _fearful_. Arrogance thickly armored him from that alien emotion. With wits untarnished by uncertainty, he spent great care on every tactical decision thus far, albeit with frustrating results due to a certain red clad obstacle. It was not entirely Mundus's fault, though, that he sacrificed so many of his troops to a sudden change of plans....

It had been the helnyne's responsibility to warn the prowls within Mallet castle - a task that, if successful, would not only have saved many lives, but would have hindered his own interests considerably. For the price of paltry lives, the demon was able to accomplish one of his goals: To make friendly contact with Trish. 

_Well_, _maybe _"_friendly_" _is too strong a word_...

The demon smiled at the memory of her exquisite anger. So few denizens were gifted with the capacity for such...defined facial expression. With her, he could clearly see the fury in every line of her face. He would remember that face... 

Another one of his goals had been to compound the doubt already plaguing her. Because of Sparda's son, she had been doubting herself, her feelings, and - surely on a subconscious level - her loyalties. Her "secret" infatuations had made the helnyne's job worlds easier. Just throw in some choice lies, and now she was skeptical of her Emperor, as well as her future under him. She had been nudged passed the point of no return, and soon her true nature would get the better of her. 

Whether she admitted it or not, she had already aligned herself to that nature. 

And the beautiful part about the whole thing was that, by the time she understood that his assertions were false, she would have no reason to raise questions. Oh sure she could request an audience with Mundus to express her concerns openly, but in doing so she would alert him to a matter on which she had little to no presentable evidence. 

Great Mundus would either laugh and condemn her to cruel ridicule, or punish her outright for wasting his time. Trish would gain nothing by pursuing the matter, leaving the helnyne to walk free. As things stood now, the demon highly doubted the blonde was going to seek out another living being for a while yet. 

_And vice-versa_. _No one will bother her_, _I_'_ve seen to that. _

Placing Alastor squarely in the half-devil's hands early in the game had been an act of genius. He had taken precautions before the theft, of course, but still the whole task had been...challenging. Leaving many a witness lifeless in his wake, he had smuggled Alastor into Mallet Castle's halls. A trinket handy had kept the devil arms dormant the entire trip, and in the end, the result of his efforts had been more than satisfactory.

Alastor's House immediately fell upon a rival House they believed was the true culprit. After the first hour since the sword's disappearance, at least ten other Houses had been sucked into the feud. Their private armies were huge, and many more bitter rivals were expected to participate before the day's end. 

The demon could only imagine how frenzied the fighting had gotten since then. Presumably, his spies were in the thick of it, gathering information from all sides if they could, and generally trying to survive the day. He hadn't heard word form them in quite some time. No matter. They weren't even _his _spies to begin with. As long as Alastor lingered in the hunter's possession, the demon wouldn't worry.

Adding Ifrit to the man's arsenal had not been his idea, though. In reality, the maniac had acted alone, surprising even the members of its own House - who had locked it away with self-preservation in mind - by rocketing out of Hell, and planting itself smack on Mallet Island. All efforts to retrieve the gauntlets had produced much ash.

It was a mess even Mundus was having a hard time cleaning up, what with his plans of world domination in full swing. 

_And as long as he stays distracted_, _I couldn_'_t_ _care less what he does_. 

The demon's thoughts returned to his newly acquired pawn. The look of terror in Trish's face at the prospect of losing Mundus - and thus, her own life - had also been a real treat. He would've pictured her brooding back in the library again...had the room still existed. If the worst cast scenario came down on her, he was certain she would not hesitate to seek refuge among mortals. She was resilient, as he had said. 

He had lied to her, but he had also told her certain....truths.

The hunter, in his refusal to lay down and die, was closing in, and Mundus was indeed bent on the man's slaughter. Mundus really had hatched a spur-of-the-moment plan that demanded Mallet's impromptu alteration - a plan, the demon was told, designed to make the hunter's death decidedly more personal. The demon shook his head at the devil Emperor's love of ironies. The fallen angel had overseen the destruction of Sparda, and so he would attend to his son in a similar fashion. 

_As for me_...

The helnyne had been relatively honest about himself in Trish's presence. He really did serve Mundus...as well as one other powerful individual. He really was an errand boy...to a point. Double-agents had to be versatile. Hells, but he hated his job! He hadn't meant to let on that part of himself until much later, maybe never, but it was a passing regret to dwell on. Trivialities shouldn't get in the way of ambition. 

He really had saved Trish's life...though not out of the goodness of his heart. He had his orders, and she still had her role to play.

The demon gurgled his satisfaction. Rivulets of mildly sulfuric rain - Hell was indeed near - harmlessly traced the lines of his face and muzzle. He had lied, had told half-truths, and he had also deceived the female on at least one more level. Though he appeared Helnyne, he was no more a member of that species as he was one of the Trinity.

The change wasn't radical, but it was an explicit mark of his unique breed. He was a race of one. The air shimmered oddly between his shoulder blades, rising to form a vague shape. The same phenomenon extended from the base of his spine like a tail of heat waves. Swiftly it materialized into a sinuous shape that hardened into dark, glossy scales. The reptilian tail terminated in a head that was both parts serpentine, and draconian. Fully formed, it issued a languid yawn of its fanged head, bright yellow eyes blinking, and filled with a sentience of their own. 

The shape on the demon's back similarly stretched the kinks out of muscles grown stiff from inactivity. Unlike its fellow symbiont, which could feasibly be compared to most earthly serpents, the second creature composed of a horned, goat-like head that could never mirror a mortal species. Dark ruby eyes shone with a light that was at once cunning, and more than a little crazed. The base of its supple neck disappeared in its host's mane - melding seamlessly with the leo's flesh underneath - and it didn't seem to mind that it lacked limbs of its own. In fact, it seemed content with working its rough, long black tongue like a wormy finger. It wasted no time in sliding the shiny appendage between its mesh of needle teeth, darting to capture every acidic drop that fell from the churning sky.

At last, the vestiges of illusionary magicks fell away from the pair. The leo spoke to his reptilian cohort without looking its way, his tone carefully neutral.

"That little prank you pulled wasn't as clever as you might have thought, you know." 

Even as she tried to offer up a sincere pout, the snake couldn't contain her chuckle. "I was only breaking the ice. You wanted to get her attention, didn't you?"

"Lucky for you Miss Spy wasn't very inclined to ask too many questions. Before that moment, I had gone over our meeting countless times in my head. I had memorized how I would move, and act...but then you had to "break the ice." Because of you I had to improvise the entire encounter. You could have complicated matters."

"Since when have you made it a habit to bemoan things that never were?" 

"Don't change the subject."

"Admit it, you enjoyed the show," she said with a smile. "Besides, I gave you the perfect excuse to make your presence known. And I seriously doubt she would have asked anything your blinding wit couldn't evade. As stunned she looked, I would've been surprised if she had said anything more articulate than "uhhh..."

"Pagan...." A quiet note of warning had entered his dusty voice. "You deliberately went against my wishes. You remember my wishes, don't you, Pagan?"

Millennia of constantly interacting with her host had accustomed Pagan's delicate, leathery ears to certain cues in his voice. It also helped that she was physically a part of him; she knew her host's mood and temperament through the murmurs of his heart, the intake of breath, the pressure of his blood in his veins, the tension of his muscles. In the end, her connection went deeper than the flesh, but stopped short of his innermost mind. She never knew his exact thoughts, but it was a rare day that she didn't know how those thoughts made him feel. 

As she opened her mouth to answer him, she knew there was no real weight behind his displeasure. It was all just a game. 

"Come now, Chimera, how could I forget your wishes, they were quite clear. You told me and Az to "keep still, and keep quiet." You told us not to do anything that might dispel our illusory guise and alert the girl, Trish. "She knows every species, every race of the Underworld by sight," you said..."

"Except us," the creature called Az piped in. "She won't know us, us unknown. Questions, questions, bad questions will she ask. Special us, special, special, special...." 

Az trailed off as a deceptively glassy look fell across his ruby eyes. Suddenly the dull expression erupted in a manic grin of needles. He went back to catching raindrops. When he spoke again, it was around the seemingly independent efforts of his rain-obsessed tongue.

"Well? Nightmares to make and promises to break. What does time think? Will there be enough?"

Pagan took her cue and gently squeezed her host's bicep. "Az is right," she said. "We are running short on time, now. He'll be here soon."

Chimera regarded Pagan for a moment, knowing she was right. He took one last, slow look around. He was a witness to the twilight, a turning of time with great significance. The curtains of rain were a tattered sprinkle of their former selves. Dark clouds exhausted of rain continued to roil, as if the stuttered bursts of lightning inside them were cause for pain. Thunder tolled like a behemoth's growl, deep and resonating. The demon stood.

Despite a good shake to rid himself of the torrent's weight, he was still very much a wet demon. This was fine. While he didn't need all the tainted water, some would serve as a necessary component to summon the Nightmares. 

Behind him, Az had grown quietly alert. They were about to get to work. This meant good things in the near future. 

Pagan was in a similar state of anticipation. The Nightmares, once set, would delay the hunter long enough for Mundus to finish preparing the stage for his execution. After that, world domination. Pagan grinned sardonically.

_I don_'_t think soooo_.

Trismagia, Oracle of the Underworld, had foreseen much of the immediate future, including what Mundus's conceit would earn him. In his place, another was meant to occupy the throne... The she-serpent drew close to Chimera's ear, restrained excitement in every word.

"Lord Argosax will be pleased."

"Indeed, he will," Chimera grinned. "We have much to tell him, all of it good."

"Finally, after all this time..." said Pagan, her gaze a touch predatory. 

Az suddenly broke into fits of hysterical laughter. "The fun had just begun! Promises to break and Kingdoms to make! Can't wait, can't wait!"

Chimera was in total agreement, but being the sensible demon that he was, he wasn't about to jump and dance just yet. The war was ongoing, and Argosax had not risen to power...yet. Oh yes, this was going to work. When Munuds was gone, and the Chaos ruled, the _real _game would begin...

"Promises to break..." Chimera murmured to himself with a hard, cunning smile. He remembered how he had given the Lord of Shapes his undying oath of loyalty and servitude, and the smile only grew. He inclined his head, glancing at his familiars with an intensity that only clairvoyants and masterminds could pull off.

"Here we go!"

And they were gone.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: The classical chimera was said to have had a lion's head and body, a goat's head on its back, and a snake, or dragon for a tail. This fire breathing monster was also said to be female, even though it possessed the mane of a male. The best representation of classical chimera is a large statue called the "Chimera of Arezzo." And that concludes this edumacational moment. 

So what's going to happen next, you might be wondering? Well since I haven't decided yet, I'm wondering along with you. I may have Dante fight a Nightmare... Or maybe I'll introduce the Frosts...? What about a chapter on Vergil's POV eh? One thing is certain, though, Trish had her moment, and now it's someone else's turn in the spotlight. 


	24. Intermission: I am weapon

Disclaimer**: **Capcom owns DMC. Alastor's/Ifrit's personalities are mine. Chimera, Pagan, and Az, as OCs, are also mine.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WolfOfTheSteppes, Burryk and The Critic: The duel between brothers will happen, that much I can tell you.

Lady Krimson: Heh...

Specter Von Barren: I was thinking about starting from the beginning once I've finished with this fic. You may get your Phantom fight yet...

Shadowed Chaos and Shadow Wolf 22: ::bows:: And if things go right, it'll only get better...

Leppress and Shanisasha: Thanks.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: Alastor's POV. Some introspection, some questions, some answers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At the moment, hot resentment simmered below a thin layer of cool, calculated indifference.

I had insulted my master, and he, faithfully, insulted me in turn, though not in a way I expected. There were none of his typical threats or jeers, no snide remarks, no taunts. I am no longer "Alastor," he told me unexpectedly. Until I redeemed myself for spitting him through the heart - a past slight he should've overlooked by now! - my punishment would be to endure my new name, specifically, a name of his choosing. By this point, I was a thought away from telling him to go fornicate with a msira. Wisely, I throttled the impulse.

So it was that my new moniker was more a nickname, rather than an entirely different identity. Upon hearing the one syllable word, Ifrit, the whore-spawned bastard that he is, deigned to let me know just how much he approved of the name...by laughing himself senseless. When the gauntlets suddenly fell from my master's wrists and began flailing on the ground in unrestrained hilarity, I knew then I had reached a new level of humiliation.

Until my day of redemption, I would be known merely as "Al."

The mongrel added salt to the wound by feigning reticence. If I couldn't see his amusement, I sure as Hell _felt _it. Twit didn't even bother to hide the emotion from me...

_Oh joy of joys_, I had thought acidly to myself, my pride adopting a fetal position. _My noble name lies gutted in the dirt_ _while the lunatic_,_ and his loudly dressed patsy_,_ laugh it up_. _I didn_'_t need another glaring reminder of how far I_'_ve fallen_. _Well_, _perhaps I should forsake sanity altogether then_, _hm_? _Like Ifrit_? _Maybe then I can fully appreciate the mechanics of a brain-addled half-breed_'_s asinine sense of humor_? _Bah_!

At least my mind is my own. No one, not even that fire fanatical blowtorch, Ifrit, can invade my private thoughts. At least I have that much. And Hell, since I'm on such a cheery bright note, if anything good can be said about playing lackey to the mongrel, it's that I've learned to control my temper in such a way that I have never had to do before. Not since my House...

Grgh-No! No...no sense in thinking about _that _anymore.

So what if they conspired against me? I am weapon to House Desparta, third most powerful House in all the Devil Kingdom. I am a symbol of their wealth, their power, their ambition, and I am their instrument of judgment and death. Still, despite all that, it's no business of mine if my House chooses to discard me. Could a superior devil arms been constructed in my place in secrecy? I wonder. As senseless as it sounds, I don't know what else to think without any memories of my expulsion to help base my reasoning on. I can't imagine anyone powerful enough to steal a soul weapon from its own House, the place of its forging! It would be like stealing coin from a nest of sleepless, particularly avaricious beasts of Satan - red dragons. Suicide.

And even if there _was _someone of great enough power, what dubious intent would drive him? And why me? As much as I'd love to claim otherwise, I'm not the most sought after sword in the Devil Kingdom... _No one _tampers with a House's devil arms without some dire retribution, be it from Pale Knight enforcers, the House patriarch, guardian beasts, guardsmen, sigil traps, wards of souls. A thief, no matter how skilled, wouldn't escape unscathed, much less survive until success. It simply wasn't possible. The fact that I continue to languish here on this gods forsaken island, apparently forgotten from sight, and memory, was well enough proof that my usefulness had become overrated.

I laugh at myself. It's a hallow sound even to my disembodied ears. I kick myself for taking circumstance so personally. Considering I grew up under the merciless codes of the Underworld, I shouldn't feel much of anything. I know the rules, I know them well. You trip, you fall, you die. It's either that or you become so disgraced that you tumble beneath the notice and care of others for the rest of you're days. Few get back up. Only the strong sur -

- I suddenly recognize where these dismal thoughts are taking me, and I growl at my traitorous musings. Like the rage and horror I felt on the moment of my capture - or the despair upon learning that Ifrit, free to do as he pleased, had become a potential hazard - I almost fell prey _again _to weak emotion.

_Pity party is_ over, _Alastor_! I hiss, venting venom. _What are you_? _A pathetic_, _mewling lost soul_? So _you_'_re House shuns you..._?_ Then_ _show them the error of their ways. Lowly servant to a transient being_? _Surprise everyone and come back stronger than ever before_! _Trivial ties should not get in the way of ambition_.

Yes, I will rise from my ashes...

I will be free one day.

In the meantime, I must plan. Oh, and keep the mongrel alive long enough to realize that plan, of course. I'm going to need his ability to move around, I think; there are places to go that I might find something helpful to my cause... Argh, but first I must learn to outwit him! He's a sharp one; I blame his sire for that. So as I plan his destruction, I will aid my master in my own way. He wishes to confront my Emperor? Fine. I can't do anything otherwise. The ensuing battle will be one-sided, a doomed endeavor, insists logic. I tell logic to go shove it. 

I hate him, this man that binds me, and I would much rather see him suffer with every shallow breath, than have him destroyed in a heartbeat. My course is set, now. I am weapon to he who walks the path to vengeance and certain doom.

But my hate will save him.


End file.
